An argument about taxonomy has been brewing between two parties who both know what they’re talking about: Theresa Regli at CMS Watch and Patrick Lambe of Organising Knowledge. At the end of last year, CMS Watch proposed that “Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata!”. As a taxonomist, Patrick Lambe took great umbrage.

I think that byline was a bit facile, but the article does prompt a serious debate about where taxonomy and more particularly expert taxonomists are heading. When organisations think web 2.0, they think wikis, user-generated content and tagging. They don’t think about well-organised content. Web 2.0 implies the death of expert taxonomy rather than the death of taxonomy itself.

People just don’t want taxonomists; they think they can organise content for themselves. While this may be true, it’s unfortunately also true that they just can’t organise content for anyone else. This creates a particular problem for systems which are dependent on finding very specific information: intranets, for example.

If you need your audience to be able to retrieve information reliably, don’t look to “audience development officers“: recognise that taxonomists do have an expertise that you’ll find useful. However, not all information needs to be structured, so feel free to challenge any taxonomist who tells you otherwise.