« Open-source personal info & micro-content | Main | MetaDesign redesign »
November 03, 2002
Controlled Vocabularies in the real world
Michael's response to Victor's comments about creating controlled vocabs in a large company is interesting. My own experience here is limited: I've done only one big CV for a project. (I have a case study for this, just waiting for the site to go live.)
Michael's description of his work process couldn't be more different then my experience. He mentions a "team of indexers" working on keeping the CV up to date, "taxonomy specialists" who work with him, and a mechanism for making sure that user feedback is incorporated. His process, and the complexity involved, sounds close to what Joanne Hackos describes in her book "Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery" (really excellent, by the way).
Our CV was developed for a specialized subsection of the semiconductor manufacturing industry. There wasn't an existing one that was complete enough, so we had to define it ourselves. I was able to work closely with subject-matter experts (in this case research scientists who develop the technologies and products) for a few days, which was enough to generate a fairly comprehensive CV.
That part was pretty easy. I think I made the mistake of explaining too much to them how the CV would inform the navigation and search systems, which meant that as we worked on the thing, they were constantly thinking "web site navigation heirarchy" instead of just "list of important terms." We also used a simple faceted structure (6 facets to index database entries, 3 of which also acted as the main site navigation). Again, since the guys I worked with to define the CV were also the main clients, I had to explain to them how this would work, and so we got sidetracked a lot while we were creating the CV into conversations about how to show all this stuff as navigation on the page.
I was very lucky in that we knew from the start that we'd have one person maintaining the CV, adding terms, making new relationships, adding synonymns and spelling variation, etc. That meant that the CV-maintenance interface didn't really need a lot of design refinement. We made it, told him how to use it, and moved on to the design of the public site and the search interfaces.
Posted by Andrew at November 3, 2002 02:26 PM