Taxonomies and Topic Maps: Categorization Steps Forward:
“The process of categorizing data need not be either expensive or overly complex. In recent correspondence on the email list xml-dev, Carol Ellerbeck, a taxonomy expert with Harvard Business School’s Baker Library and formerly of Lycos, made this very point. Responding to a writer who suggested that one needed to be “king of the world” and have “an unlimited budget” to create effective taxonomies, Ellerbeck wrote, “If you ‘were king of the world’…you would not need ‘an unlimited budget’…just a modest one, to have experts build your taxonomy/domain vocabularies. I say this as a taxonomist who has been in the vocabulary trenches with electronic information for years. Automation is wonderful (and I would say, even essential), but start with not just humans (albeit smart humans), start with humans who have some expertise, and you will accomplish your goal faster, with fewer people, more efficiently, and have a more solid foundation to build on.””