Organize with taxonomy

If you still remember the way a high school science project report is written, you may be surprised how easy it was to manage the few citations used. You may have jotted it down on a piece of paper, and later typed it into a word processor. In college, you had more reference material to manage. If a reference manager is used, putting them into a few folders may be good enough. For a graduate student, a college professor, or a scientist, she or he may need to manage hundreds, even thousands of references. As your collection grows, putting them into a few project folders will prove to be inadequate. You need to divide your huge collection into meaningful subsets so you can quickly access them. If you share a database with other researchers, information classification becomes even more essential.

In Biblioscape, information objects (references, notes, etc.) are stored  in folders in the project tree. You will soon discover that organizing by one dimension (project folders) is not enough. There are needs to classify information objects by other dimensions. For example, you have collected hundreds of references for a research project about prostate cancer. Instead of having a single list of hundreds or even thousands of records, you may want to classify them into sub-groups based on different criteria. One list of categories may be about stages of the disease while another list may be about different treatments. When you read a reference, you may drag it into a different category. Sometimes, you may want to file one record into several categories so you can later retrieve what you want more easily. This is also true for notes. When you have collected hundreds of notes for your research project, you need to classify your notes in more than one way. We deploy our knowledge in specific situations, so tagging your records also needs to reflect this. Different situations require a different set of tags. In Biblioscape, you can organize your tags (categories) into folders or under different branches of the categories tree.

Use taxonomies to organize information

Taxonomy is a Greek word about the classification of various things. The word gives people an impression of classification in the scientific world, but actually, people practice this art in daily life. The historian Hayden White said, "The beginning of all understanding is classification". We use taxonomy to group related things together in all aspects of our life. The classification scheme can be very informal and ad hoc.

Relationship of terms in a taxonomy

When you design a taxonomy to organize your information objects, you have to choose the terms carefully. Ambiguous terms should be avoided. Alternates and synonyms should not be entered as a separate term. Instead, you can put synonyms in the "Other names" list so when you use the synonym for searching, the correct hits can still be found. The most common relationship in a taxonomy is the parent child relationship. This relationship could mean many different things like "part of", "type of", etc. Biblioscape also allows you to add other types of relationships by using the link feature. You can click "Create Link", link one category to another one, and assign a relationship for your link.

Taxonomy and knowledge management

Some people argue that the full text search in Biblioscape makes organizing records unnecessary. This argument assumes you know what search terms to use. People who have collected thousands of records may have this experience: you vaguely remember something that you have collected before. You try one search term and can't find it. You then try many more search terms but still cannot find the record you want. This is a very common experience for people with a large database. Our memory has limited power. If we don't categorize the things we collect, even with full text search, we still have trouble finding the things we want quickly. If you have built a taxonomy or even a simple term list and file your records into different categories, you can browse related categories to retrieve the records you want to find when you don't know what search words to use.

Folksonomy vs taxonomy

Folksonomy means that individual users are given the right to tag records using their own terms. Taxonomy is usually built by authority with carefully chosen terms. It reflects a top down approach. Folksonomy gives end users the freedom to tag records ad hoc. It represents a bottom up approach. In Biblioscape, both folksonomy and taxonomy can be used in a multi user environment. If you are the only user, the concept of folksonomy doesn't apply. In a multi user environment, each user can create a categories folder and store all his or her terms under this folder. This gives individual users the freedom to organize information objects in their own way. As more records are tagged, patterns may be formed. The administrator can summarize and extract from folksonomies to build a common set of taxonomy with a controlled vocabulary. If different terms are used for the same concept in folksonomies, they can be added to the "Other names" list. In this way, folksonomy and taxonomy will compliment each other.