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May 28, 2002

Managing Spaghetti Content

Every content management application demands a well-ordered taxonomy. The challenge is to maintain taxonomy quality as content evolves over time

By Philip Russom

The evolution of a taxonomy and the content it manages is like cooking spaghetti. Early in its lifecycle, a taxonomy is well organized like boxes of pasta containing straight and separate strands. As the taxonomy ages, however, the strands of content curl and intertwine like a plate of tangled spaghetti. You can make the intertwined content seem better organized by hiding it under a layer of tomato sauce, the way many portal user interfaces do. But then, the catch is to eat the pasta without slinging sauce on your shirt.

Importance of Taxonomies

An important step in managing content is cataloging it, and that's what a taxonomy does. A taxonomy is a collection of relevant topics and subtopics arranged in a hierarchical or networked structure. Sometimes called a document directory, catalog, classification, or categorization, a taxonomy imposes order on content chaos. It's also the piece inside a content management application through which end users access content.

Taxonomies are embedded in many types of content management applications, including corporate and Internet-based portals, document management systems, and knowledge management systems. Because end users rely on taxonomies as key components for maintaining order and accessing content, taxonomy quality is an important benchmark for determining the success or failure of a content management application.

Taxonomy Life Cycle

When you first deploy a content-management application, the taxonomy is well structured, and its content is appropriately cataloged, due to the attention lavished on it during design and implementation phases. But, as new content enters over time, the new world order imposed by the taxonomy all too often regresses back to old world chaos.

The degradation of a taxonomy can result from poor practices among end users:

End users may incorrectly associate content with a topic.
When allowed to add a new topic, an end user may create a redundant one.
When facing new content on a topic not represented in the taxonomy, end users tend to dump it in a "miscellaneous" topic, which hampers queries and searches.

The quality of a taxonomy is also affected by factors outside end users' control, namely reorgs (when the taxonomy reflects corporate structures) and the sudden appearance of new topics (which is typical of imported content).

As with many types of IT systems, taxonomies have recurring quality cycles, as charted in Figure 1. The amount of time it takes to progress from order to chaos is affected by a lot of variables, such as the number of users, whether users can alter it, the sophistication of users, volume of content, and whether content is generated internally or imported from external sources. Even so, many corporations report that degradation is clearly apparent after a year, which is why some companies plan a major revision of a taxonomy annually, and a few practice "preventative maintenance" by revising taxonomies quarterly.