Multi-faceted context-dependent knowledge organisation with TACKO
Florian Matthes, Christian Neubert, Alexander Steinhoff · 2012
Purely hierarchical classification schemes such as taxonomies have been the primary means for knowledge organization for millennia and are still predominant in current information systems, for example in the form of hierarchical menus or folder hierarchies. However, due to the growing amount of digital information as well as improved technical possibilities, other organization schemes such as faceted classification schemes or so-called folksonomies, the result of social tagging activity, recently gained popularity. While these approaches address particular shortcomings of purely hierarchical organization of information, they exhibit certain characteristics limiting their general applicability. In this paper, we first give an overview of the particular strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to knowledge organization. Subsequently, we present a formal model of TACKO, a novel organization scheme that is inspired by the flexibility of tagging systems, i.e., the assignment of keywords to information resources, and incorporates elements of hierarchical and faceted organization schemes, so it can be considered a synthesis of the aforementioned schemes. We illustrate TACKO using a small example scenario. Additionally, we present a user interface for our approach, that we implemented in a modern web-based collaboration software.