Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design Annotated
Okay--I've already blogged about mind-mapping and its relationship to the "concept mapping" note taking scheme that I was introduced to in my college Biology class. But, I was reminded by the article above that it was Biologists who started this whole taxonomy mess--see quote below:Historically used by biologists to classify plants or animals according to a set of natural relationships, in content management and information architecture, we tend to leverage taxonomies as a tool for organizing content.
One of my quests during sabbatical is to define a taxonomy that lets Judson University manage content better. My initial motives were driven by the need to push content to our website in a way that makes sense to our various constituents--students, prospects, alumni etc., but the truth is that this taxonomy or "information architecture plan" or "controlled vocabulary" has broader uses than just the website.My key questions are as follows:
Can the everyday work accomplished by University employees be leveraged to create the content for the website? In other words, can the work they're already doing (no retraining necessary) be used to create "up to date" and accurate content for our various audiences?Can a system be created for content creation that allows the "experts" be in charge of particular areas of content? For example, can the business office function of the university be in charge of the content for all tuition cost questions with all of the departments in the University linking to that content for the accurate, concise and unified answer?
Can a system of organization (taxonomy) be designed in such a way that it actually fosters relationships with our key constituents? For instance, can alumni testimonials harvested through the alumni community portion of the website be re-purposed to the departments they graduated from to potentially sell current prospects on the reason they should consider attending Judson?
