Classified Information

In the spirit of working hard to make information more easily accessible, we take one important que from the world of biology.  Hundreds of years ago, biologists realized that the animal kingdom was far too complicated to just be tackled at face value.  They wisely decided that things needed to be classified into a hierarchical structure, based on their characteristics, to that studying them would be more accessible.  And the taxonomy was born.  Since that point, every time a new plant or animal is discovered, it could be analyzed for its characteristics, and filed accordingly into a 7-tier taxonomy (now referred to as the Alpha Taxonomy).

Online communities are far less complicated than the animal kingdom, but they still require classification of knowledge assets to function well.  The shared purpose, goal or interest of the community doesn’t have to be that complicated to make interacting around it cumbersome without some kind of mechanism for breaking down the information at hand into more digestable chunks.  The same principle scientists used to conquer the world of biology is what we’ll use to conquer smaller, simpler worlds in our online communities.

To address this need, we define the key term “knowledge taxonomy”.  A knowledge taxonomy is the (typically hierarchical) classification of knowledge assets, for the purpose of making them easier to find and understand.  In most online community models, including Capable Networks’, the common purpose, goal or interest of the community is organized into such a taxonomy.  Any content item in the community is classified to (associated with) one or more topics (nodes) in the taxonomy.

So, if you post a discussion to the community, you’ll want to let people know what that discussion is about so that it’s easier for them to find and understand.  In a community about pets, you might post your comments about your favorite pet to “favorite pet” and “dogs”, because (go figure) your favorite pet is a dog.  You get the idea.  Same would be true if you wrote an article, or created a blog entry, or whatever.  The better the information is described by this kind of categorization, the easier it will be for others to interact with it.  And that’s our goal.

Technorati tags: taxonomy, classification