A taxonomy is a way of classifying things or concepts by similarities in structure, use, concepts, relationships or intent. It is a very broad concept that has a lot of uses, and the breadth of this concept is where most of your confusion comes from. It is a little bit like asking "what is a dozen?" The definition of a dozen is pretty straightforward, but if you go to a candy store and tell the clerk "I'll take a dozen," the clerk is likely to ask "a dozen what?"
So, if someone says they don't believe in the usefulness of taxonomies it is a little like saying they don't believe in the usefulness of a dozen. Taxonomies are a part of life whether we recognize them or not. The human mind organizes things into manageable sets and then works with the relationships between the things in the set.
So all well and good, but what kind of taxonomies are we talking about? Physical mailing addresses are a great example of a common taxonomy. In the US we take it for granted that each place is mapped to a single address. On the other hand there are a great many ways to write those various addresses. is it "1st Ave N" or "1st Avenue N" or "First Ave North?" Companies that work a lot with mailing addresses can go out and purchase a set of files with all the mailing addresses for North America entered into a huge list. Then, rather than type in the address the user can pick a street, house number, state, zip and so on. Most GPS systems work with prepopulated address taxonomies like this because it takes fewer system resources to spell it all out than it does to write code that can interpret imprecise addresses.
If you use a tool like mapquest the computer interprets your feeble and fuzzy human attempt to type in an address (at least mine are feeble and fuzzy, I don't know about yours) and then it comes back with a list of addresses you may have actually been attempting to enter. This is a process where Mapquest runs a fuzzy search against an established list of addresses.
Strictly speaking the list of addresses is not really the taxonomy as such. the taxonomy is the set of definitions, rules and principles that make addresses meaningful. The list of addresses is a set of standard terms that follow the taxonomy and can be used to generate standard information in compliance with the taxonomy.
Telephone numbers used to form something of a taxonomy. Area codes told you the large geographic area where the phone resided. The prefix provided greater resolution for the location of the phone, and so on. Now that the phone system is based on digital switching technologies, and you have the right to retain your phone number, and long distance calling is often bundled at a set fee, your telephone number is just a number. It really has no embedded information, logic or relationship represented within it.
In the United States the Social Security Number is intentionally devoid of embedded information. one way to approach it would have been to have the various numbers mean something about the individual. That was considered an invasion of privacy, and also a great big hassle to administrate, so the Social Security Number is intentionally devoid of encoded information. Two of my sons happen to have sequential SSNs but that is mere coincidence. Sequential numbers are not an indicator of relationship; we just happened to apply for their numbers at the same time and on a slow day.
So, should you invest in an address file that will deploy into SharePoint and make it so all your knowledge workers use exactly the same address? Yes! I can't think of a reason why this is a bad idea. It actually makes it faster for people to enter information, and it can make it harder to fudge metadata (which is where that information will wind up). So, when we talk about noun taxonomies we are talking about this kind of list. If your business leads you to interact with the medical profession, it is a great idea to buy a taxonomy of medical terms and install it in SharePoint. This means that you can use those terms, insurance codes, diagnostic criteria and so on throughout your entire organization with every site and library. This is a good thing.
It is even better to cap this off by structuring your content types, site collections, and templates so that the right prepopulated noun taxonomies come along with it. The focus of my workshop is to initiate your SharePoint project with taxonomies and governance scoped into the project, and to establish the rules that will govern that information.
So, in a tool like SharePoint, it is possible to make it so that confidential financial information can only be communicated to certain locations, roles, systems, etc. without executive approval. The "Verb Taxonomy" that I'm pushing is a taxonomy (structured set of policies organized by relationships and principles) of policies that can use the noun taxonomies as input and automatically provide workflows and approvals. It is important to provide a taxonomy of business policies that can be used to influence and govern the use of information across the enterprise. This goes for SharePoint and any other tool in your organization.
The noun taxonomy can be used to classifly a document as being a "financial" document. Once it is classified, how do you want it to behave? What are the rules for working with that document? What is an appropriate audience. You don't want to leave these decisions to each individual's interpretation, but you also don't want to rigidly lock the system down in order to control the use of the document. So, we are looking for a relatively simple way to establish policies governing the use of different classes of information, and to have those policies logically "follow" the document wherever it goes. SharePoint provides is with a powerful and simple method of inheritance, and if we inherit based on content types then those inherited workflows, policies, templates and approvals will logically follow the document.
So, you need both a noun taxonomy and a verb taxonomy.
A great place to shop for prepopulated taxonomy lists is www.taxonomywarehouse.com.
©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved
