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Alan Gilchrist: &lpar>[email protected]) is an information management consultant at CURA Consortium and is an Associate Consultant at TFPL Ltd.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Refereed article received 3 December 2000 Approved for publication 18 January 2001
Introduction
This paper reports on a survey of current practice in the building and use of taxonomies, principally within the corporate enterprise, but with some attention paid to their application in publicly available portals.
TFPL is a recruitment and training, research and consultancy company, based in London and New York. TFPL's interest in taxonomies was a logical progression from its active involvement in information and knowledge management, intranets and Enterprise Information Portals. In 1999, TFPL became aware of a buzz of activity, in the UK and abroad, in taxonomy creation, and a brief investigation culminating in two workshops at their EBIC Conference in Amsterdam in March 2000 confirmed that this was an area of interest that was likely to have a significant impact on information accessibility. Consequently, a short research project was initiated with funding from TFPL itself, and Bright Station, a supplier of software solutions for information retrieval and taxonomy building. The project itself was conducted solely and impartially by TFPL, during August and September 2000. (A report, Taxonomies for Business, TFPL, London, 2000, is available from TFPL.)
Background: the need for action
The backlash from the huge advances in ICT and the provision of intranets and Enterprise Information Portals is now being painfully experienced at the desktop in a new wave of information overload. A recent report from Varian and Lyman (2000), of the University of California Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems, on new information production has put forward some startling figures. For the first time, according to the authors, the terabyte (a million megabytes) has been used as a common standard of measurement to compare the size of information in all media, linking research and interpreting research reports from industry and academia. For example:
- the directly accessible "surface" Web consists of about 2.5 billion documents and is growing at a rate of 7.3 million documents per day;
- counting the "surface" Web with the "deep" Web of connected databases, intranet sites and dynamic pages, there are about 550 billion documents, and 95 per cent is publicly accessible.