What is tagging? As a science editor, why do I need to know about tagging?

Tagging is an important part of Web 2.0 because it allows readers of to classify your content using their own terminology. With scores of readers classifying content, a user-defined taxonomy emerges. Wikipedia refers to the outcome as a “folksonomy,” defining it as “a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.”

Have you ever tried to find a product in the grocery store using the store’s signage? Have you ever searched and searched, only to find the product and think, “why did they put that there?” Now, what if grocery shoppers organized that same grocery store, categorizing products by where they make the most sense? Perhaps crackers would appear with cheese, or cookies would appear next to the milk. The grocery store could be transformed based on shoppers’ actions!

As a science editor, think about how users might be classifying your content. Add social bookmarking icons to your site, thereby making it easy for those users to share content with others. It’s all about getting people to talk about your content, to attach importance to it, and to share it with others.

There is now an online key to the 86 species of Chrysididae in North America!

It is, of course, quite useful, but the best parts are all the detailed photos of these lovely Hymenopterans.

Thanks go to Nigel Jones for his lovely photo which you must view at full size, and to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center for creating this valuable resource!

Melvin Dewey introduced to the world, the Dewey Decimal System (1876) for categorising books into 10 broad subjects then sub-categorising those, so on and so forth.

Today, for the Internet, we use a method which was first dubbed by Thomas Vander Wal (an information architect and web developer) ‘folksonomy’. It begins with tagging, first widely used by people on the FlickR network where users could label pictures with short descriptive text.

Folksonomy is a bottom-up user generated categorisation system, a method where you’re not required to have a degree in library science to participate.

Yes it reduces an almost perfect mathematical system for categorisation to words, but it means searching for images or blogs or any information on the internet much more effective and simple for the average user. Better still, with so much information out there in cyberspace, some of it being crap (excuse my French) we are able to categorise the useful data as folksonomists.

Recommending good articles in your social network has become alot easier by the work of folksonomists, so please use this privilege wisely and remember to tag relevantly.

Amazon and other digital library catalogues have now established a folksonomic approach to categorising books, Melvin Dewey will not be amused! But I love it! Helps me find the information I need in the most effective way.

The History of Scientific Classification

For centuries, the naming and classification of living organisms into groups has been an integral part of the study of nature.

Aristotle (384BC-322BC) developed the first known method of classifying organisms, grouping organisms by their means of transport (air, land, water). A number of other naturalists followed with other classification systems, but it was Swedish botanist, Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) that is considered to be the pioneer of modern taxonomy.

In his book Systema Naturae, first published in 1735, Carolus Linnaeus introduced a rather clever way to classify and name organisms. This system, now referred to as Linnaean taxonomy, has been used to varying extents, ever since.

About Linnaean Taxonomy

Linnaean taxonomy categorizes organisms into a hierarchy of kingdoms, classes, orders, families, genera, and species based on shared physical characteristics. The category of phylum was added to the classification scheme later, as a hierarchical level just beneath kingdom.

Groups at the top of the hierarchy (kingdom, phylum, class) are more broad in definition and contain a greater number of organisms than the more specific groups that are lower in the hierarchy (families, genera, species).

By assigning each group of organisms to a kingdom, phylum, class, family, genus, and species, they can then be uniquely characterized. Their membership in a group tells us about the traits they share with other members of the group, or the traits that make them unique when compared to organisms in groups to which they do not belong.

Many scientists still use the classification system today, but it is no longer the only method for grouping and characterizing organisms. Scientists now have many different ways of identifying organisms and describing how they relate to each other.

To best understand the science of classification, it will help to first examine a few basic terms:

• classification – the systematic grouping and naming of organisms based on shared structural similiarites, fuctional similarities, or evolutionary history
• taxonomy – the science of classifying organisms (describing, naming, and categorizing organisms)
• systematics – the study of the diversity of live and the relationships between organisms

Types of Classification Systems

With an understanding of classification, taxonomy, and systematics, we can now examine the different types of classifications systems that are available. For instance, you can classify organisms according to their structure, placing organisms that look similar in the same group. Alternatively, you can classify organisms according to their evolutionary history, placing organisms that have a shared ancestory in the same group. These two approaches are referred to as phenetics and cladistics and are defined as follows:

• phenetics – a method of classifying organisms that is based on their overall similarity in physical characteristics or other observable traits (it does not take phylogeny into account)
• cladistics – a method of analysis (genetic analysis, biochemical analysis, morphological analysis) that determines relationships between organisms that are based solely on their evolutionary history

In general, Linnaean taxonomy uses phenetics to classify organisms. This means it relies on physical characteristics or other observable traits to classify organisms and does consider the evolutionary history of those organisms. But keep in mind that similar physical characteristics are often the product of shared evolutionary history, so Linnaean taxonomy (or phenetics) sometimes reflects the evolutionary background of a group of organisms.

Cladistics (also called phylogenetics or phylogenetic systematics) looks to the evolutionary history of organisms to form the underlying framework for their classification. Cladistics therefore differs from phenetics in that it is based on phylogeny (the evolutionary history of a group or lineage), not on the observation of physical similarites.

Cladograms

When characterizing the evolutionary history of a group of organisms, scientists develop tree-like diagrams called cladograms. These diagrams consist of a series of branches and leaves that represent the evolution of groups of organisms through time. When a group splits into two groups, the cladogram displays a node, after which the branch then proceeds in different directions. Organisms are located as leaves (at the ends of the branches). To view an example of a cladogram, see Cladistics.

Biological classification is in a continual state of flux. As our knowledge of organisms expands, we gain a better understanding of the similarities and differences among various groups of organisms. In turn, those similarities and differences shape how we assign animals to the various groups (taxa).

taxon (pl. taxa) – taxonomic unit, a group of organisms that has been named

Factors That Shaped High-Order Taxonomy

The invention of the microscope in the mid-sixteenth century, revealed a minute world filled with countless new organisms that had previously escaped classification because they were too tiny to see with the naked eye.

Throughout the past century, rapid advances in evolution and genetics (as well as a host of related fields such as cell biology, molecular biology, molecular genetics, and biochemistry, to name just a few) constantly reshape our understanding of how organisms related to one another and shed new light on previous classifications. Science is constantly reorganizing the branches and leaves of the tree of life.

The vast changes to classification that have occurrred throughout the history of taxonomy can best be understood by examing how the highest level taxa (domain, kindom, phylum) have changed throughout history.

The history of taxonomy stretches back to the 4th century BC, to the times of Aristotle and before. Since the first classification systems emerged, dividing the world of life into various groups with various relationships, scientists have grappled with the task of keeping classification in sync with scientific evidence.

The sections that follow provide a summary of the changes that have taken place at the highest level of biological classification over the history of taxonomy.

Two Kingdoms (Aristotle, during 4th century BC)

Classification system based on: Observation (phenetics)

Aristotle was among the first to document the division of life forms into animals and plants. Aristotle classified animals according to observation, for example, he defined high-level groups of animals by whether or not they had red blood (this roughly reflects the division between vertebrates and invertebrates used today).

• Plantae – plants
• Animalia – animals

Three Kingdoms (Ernst Haeckel, 1894)

Classification system based on: Observation (phenetics)

The three kingdom system, introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1894, reflected the long-standing two kindoms (Plantae and Animalia) that can be attributed to Aristotle (perhaps before) and added third kingdom, Protista that included single-celled eukaryotes and bacteria (prokaryotes).

• Plantae – plants (mostly autotrophic, multicelluar eukaryotes, reproduction by spores)
• Animalia – animals (heterotrophic, multicelluar eukaryotes)
• Protista – single celled eukaryotes and bacteria (prokaryotes)

Four Kingdoms (Herbert Copeland, 1956)

Classification system based on: Observation (phenetics)

The important changed introduced by this classification scheme was the introduction of the Kingdom Bacteria. This reflected the growing understanding that bacteria (single-celled prokaryotes) were very much different from single-celled eukaryotes. Previously, single-celled eukaryotes and bacteria (single-celled prokaryotes) were grouped together in the Kindom Protista. But Copeland elevated Haeckel’s two Protista phyla to the level of kindom.

• Plantae – plants (mostly autotrophic, multicelluar eukaryotes, reproduction by spores)
• Animalia – animals (heterotrophic, multicelluar eukaryotes)
• Protista – single-celled eukaryotes (lack tissues or extensive cellular differentiation)
• Bacteria – bacteria (single-celled prokaryotes)

Five Kingdoms (Robert Whittaker, 1959)

Classification system based on: Observation (phenetics)

Robert Whittaker’s 1959 classification scheme added a fifth kingdom to Copeland’s four kingdoms, the Kindom Fungi (single and multi-celluar osmotrophic eukaryotes)

• Plantae – plants (mostly autotrophic, multicelluar eukaryotes, reproduction by spores)
• Animalia – animals (heterotrophic, multicelluar eukaryotes)
• Protista – single-celled eukaryotes (lack tissues or extensive cellular differentiation)
• Monera – bacteria (single-celled prokaryotes)
• Fungi (single and multi-celluar osmotrophic eukaryotes)

Six Kingdoms (Carl Woese, 1977)

Classification system based on: Evolution and molecular genetics (Cladistics/Phylogeny)

In 1977, Carl Woese extended Robert Whittaker’s Five Kingdoms to replace Kingdom bacteria with two kingdoms, Eubacteria and Archaebacteria. Archaebacteria differ from Eubacteria in their genetic transcription and translation processes (in Archaebactera, transcription and translation more closely resembled eukaryotes). These distinguising characteristics were shown by molecular genetic analysis.

• Plantae – plants (mostly autotrophic, multicelluar eukaryotes, reproduction by spores)
• Animalia – animals (heterotrophic, multicelluar eukaryotes)
• Eubacteria – bacteria (single-celled prokaryotes)
• Archaebacteria – prokaryotes (differ from bacteria in their genetic transcriptionand translation, more similar to eukaryotes)
• Protista – single-celled eukaryotes (lack tissues or extensive cellular differentiation)
• Fungi – single and multi-celluar osmotrophic eukaryotes

Three Domains (Carl Woese, 1990)

Classification system based on: Evolution and molecular genetics (Cladistics/Phylogeny)

In 1990, Carl Woese put forth a classification scheme that greatly overhauled previous classification schemes. The three-domain system he proposed is baseed on molecular biology studies, and resulted in the placement of organisms into three domains.

• Bacteria
• Archaea
• Eukarya

Source: About.com, Laura Klappenbach

It’s far easier to end things than to figure out things past the end.

Upshot: I’m having difficulty with the dystopias.

I did manage to put together a chart, but it’s pretty spongy. I’d put in ‘violent’ here or ‘charismatic’ there, then take it out, move it around.

I don’t have it—I’m missing something; no flow, here.

So let’s just call this Dystopia-Beta

• I. Cause
  • A. Collapse
    • i. catastrophic (SEE Apocalypse)
    • ii. gradual breakdown
  • B. Evolution
    • i. of species
      • a. human
      • b. non-human
    • ii. of society
• II. Type
  • A. Chaotic
    • i. non-violent
      • a. few people
      • b. hostile environment
    • ii. episodically violent
      • a. individual predation
      • b. criminal gangs
      • c. militias
    • iii. war
      • a. criminal gangs
      • b. militias
      • c. organized armies
  • B. Corporate
    • i. workers controlled
    • ii. consumers controlled
  • C. Party government
    • i. everything-is-good
      • a. dissenters marginalized
      • b. dissenters jailed/killed
      • c. dissenters re-educated
    • ii. everything-is-grim
      • a. populace atomized
      • b. populace enslaved
      • c. ongoing genocide
    • iii. behind-the-scenes
      • a. omnipresent/tracks behavior
      • b. omniscient/tracks affect & intellect
  • D. Military government
    • i. military in sync with society
    • ii. military opposed to society
    • iii. entire society militarized
  • E. Theocracy
    • i. elite/exclusive
      • a. exploits populace
      • b. suppresses populace
      • c. forcibly converts populace
    • ii. populist/inclusive
      • a. cultic/centered on charismatic leader
      • b. pietistic/communitarian
      • c. dogmatic/authoritarian
  • III. Stage
    • A. Immediate post-
      • i. no control
      • ii. begin control
    • B. Semi-stable
      • i. partial control [against chaos]
      • ii. organized fight for control
    • C. Stable
      • i. evolving
      • ii. eternal

(I have to say, this was a total pain in the ass to put together—all those damned ‘li’ and ‘backslash ul’—but I did it. Still, I am lazy enough that if flow charts require anything near the persnickety-ness of a nested chart, fuggedaboudit. )

Not so great, I know, but it’s a start.

Suggestions welcome.

We were sitting in a small, dark booth drinking expensive beer when Abby and I decided that we had a ethical (perhaps even a moral) obligation to explain something to you.

One of the things that united us as Jerks With Glasses – aside from the fact that we, you know, both wear glasses – is an abiding love of categorization. This love led us to create a tongue-in-cheek photographic archive of people on boats (with such categories as UNSAFE!, your kids are bored, and phallic symbols). It led us to produce a series of events that neatly organize your moments of adolescent humiliation into themes.

And it is leading us, over the next several weeks, to present to you a taxonomy of jerks (with glasses).

It is our hope that you will use this information to orient yourself to the world with a better understanding of the motivations (and often the poor choices) of those that surround you.

In planning this taxonomy, we sketched out a chart*. One axis denotes the level of influence or the amount of power a jerk has. We have affectionately named the other axis “The Fuck You Axis,” which should be self-explanatory and accounts for an important problem we’ve encountered when writing about jerks. There are some jerks you admire and some jerks you really loath.

And so begins your Snarkimental Education:
HIPSTERS WITH GLASSES BIGGER THAN YOURS

Who's got the biggest...

We agonized over how to define this category. It hits a little close to home. We have prominent frames. We listen to music that’s generally better than yours. We have vintage aprons and cookbooks. We watch our artsy tv series with the French subtitles turned on. We’ve created this site, for goodness sake.

But we’re not sure we want to be considered “the dead end of Western civilization.”

So. Here it is.  Hipsters recycle prior trends without a fleck of authenticity.  So, remember those Sally Jesse Raphael frames your mother inexplicably made you wear in middle school?  Yeah.  Hipsters like those.  Remember Elvis Costello’s glasses (great band name, by the way)?  They wear those without recognizing the man to whom they ought to be paying homage.  Hipsters are jerks because they hate history.  They hate history while pretending not to care.

Abby and I may be jerks with prominent glasses, BUT WE DO NOT HATE HISTORY.  AND WE CARE A LOT.

* We will provide a copy of this chart when we finish presenting the taxonomy.

Social media is going to take budget dollars away from search engine marketing. Already is in many major brands. Simple economics are driving this transition.

If a major ecommerce player is spending 50% of their budget on search engine marketing, website optimization, and link optimization programs, but is losing the war to bloggers in organic search. Why would the ecommerce player continue to spend massive amounts of money on advertising when they can focus on blogger outreach (ethical, not paid) for far less money. Better yet, fix their customer experience and get customers to evangelize on their behalf.  this slide says it all….

Additionally, as we analyze the various social media monitoring and metrics tools, the challenge is pretty evident. Search engines work off of structured data. I can run an advanced search and build filters for my search results. The challenge with social search is that the taxonomy isn’t defined. How you talk about a problem can be completely different than I talk about it. Potential buyers may not even recognize that the problem they are discussing on social media is even in the market. How do you build an automated tracking of taxonomy around unstructured data?

Effective lead generation program within social marketing require human knowledge of your solutions and also the ability to follow discussion threads to identify contextual relavence. Over time, you should be able to fine tune the algorithms for your social monitoring programs to become 80% accurate, but the most successful programs are leveraging human knowledge to make social marketing engagement programs to become discoverable, impactful, and actionable.

Otherwise, you get the the large number of costly “unqualified” leads that flood into websites similar to the search engine marketing programs. These programs either make it up in volume or work the “long tail” of key words to reach better qualified buyers. Social marketing can get you to the “long tail” faster as most buyers start with questions in the long tail when they do not know what they are looking for and leverage the expertise of others to become more specific as they learn what they don’t know.

During my literature and activity search as part of my orientation on cloud computing I found an interesting blog by Peter Laird .  On his blog Peter has a Cloud Vendor Taxonomy diagram, which I have inserted below.

Cloud Vendor Taxonomy, May 2009 (By Peter Laird)

The full sized diagram can be found here.

I got into a discussion with my colleagues the other day about the merits of collecting multiple specimens of taxa versus collecting something new. The reality of course is that there is rarely a choice to be made – you bring back everything you find in the field that you can. However, as a hypothetical discussion it is interesting since of course you can do very different science with 10 specimens representing 10 different species and 10 specimens of a single species.

This debate aside (one for another time) it led me to get around to writing this post which I have long intended to complete on the differing importance of different specimens. It is understandable that some people might think “so you have 25 Triceratops, so what? Surely once you have one good, complete one, there’s not much more to learn?” but of course this is far from the truth.

As I have covered before on my series of posts on taxonomy, multiple specimens can give you a huge insight into the variation of fossil animals as living organisms – be it intraspecific or sexual. If animals are of different ages then you can learn about ontogeny and growth and of course there is always the change that a new specimen shows off some odd characteristic like a pathology, bite marks from a predator or something like this.

Some specimens (and the fighting dinosaurs are a great example) cannot easily be prepared for research, no matter how good they are (or in this case, not without losing a lot of other important information). Another specimen where all the bones can be separated out and viewed and analysed in 3D is great therefore allowing all kinds of extra information to be accessed and things like range of motion in joints to be examined firsthand. Similarly, having a ‘sacrificial’ specimen is great – no one wants to chop up a brilliant holotype to look at the bone histology or look at replacement teeth or the braincase, but a second specimen allows you to be a bit free-er with your methods and destructive sampling becomes a serious option – even a very fragmentary partial bone can be enough for this.

OK, maybe we don't need to collect this.

So while obviously for most palaeontologists a single complete skeleton is a great find, every little specimen is valuable. However, it would be a mistake to consider each of equal value – a single broken femur is good for destructive sampling, but an articulated leg is more useful and obviously several complete animals are better still. Even this varies from researcher to researcher – histologists are likely overjoyed by a bunch of otherwise largely unimportant partial specimens that they can sample while behaviourists won’t get too worked up until they hit a whole herd preserved together.

I imagine most of this is largely very obvious, but still there is typically always one more angle to think about and I hope I may have highlighted one or two here. It’s easy to get stuck in the mindset of ‘what would I do with that fossil’ which might be very useful for you, but not always that of your colleagues.

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I mentioned in my last school post (the one about set ups), that I’d used a modified version of The Future Is Wild’s animal design activity.

While TFiW is more focused on evolution and decent with modification, my class was currently focusing on a more ecological unit – what roles do different organisms have in an ecosystem, how do they interact and how do we classify them.

Previous lessons had gone through self-made classification schemes, traditional classification schemes (e.g. The Classical Greek), and scientific classification schemes. The two scientific classification schemes were taught in my classes.Biological classification (Linnean/5 Kingdom/Taxonomy) Organisms are assigned into tiered groupings according to shared characteristics. All complex multicellular organisms that consume other organisms are called Animals; All animals with backbones are Vertebrates; All vertebrates with fur and mammary glands are mammals. The major tiers are Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.

AND

Trophic dynamics (Ecological niches/Food chains and webs) Organisms within an ecosystem are assigned a specific role according to their position in the food chain. Organisms that create their own energy are known as producers. Organisms that eat other living things are known as consumers. Primary consumers eat the producers, while secondary consumers eat primary consumers. There are also decomposers that process dead and waste materials so they can be reused by the producers. Producers make their own energy so are called autotrophs. Consumers and decomposers get energy from multiple sources and are called heterotrophs.

To use these with the design-an-organism activity, the class agreed upon an environment and then each group was assigned a trophic niche and had to set about designing an organism to fill that niche. Afterwards they would have to present it to the class and attempt to classify it according to scientific taxonomy.

In addition to be given different trophic niche, each group was given a different medium with which to create their masterpiece – pencils, crayons, collage, and craft (I avoided paints too much mess). What I had really wanted was to give each group (or even each student) a copy of Spore: Creature Creator to push up my ICT integration level.

Sadly, despite one of my supervising teachers having copy, it was only one. The combination of EQ IT policy and EA’s crippling DRM meant after two weeks, I had it installed on a single computer in the school and available for only one user account. It still provided a good way to demonstrate the task concept, and also a reward for those students who worked hard and completed the task early.

Some groups had created chimeras – combining the body parts of different animals they new – which then lead to difficulty in the second part of the task (is a half elephant-ladybug an insect or mammal? how do we tell?). Other groups worked pretty well to create some original concepts such as a grass that squawks like a parrot to ward of predators, a crocodile with brightly coloured feathers to attract fish, and a giant man eating snail.

Many thanks to colleague Jake Zarnegar for pointing me toward Slate columnist Michael Agger’s Google Suggest contest.

I’m sure you’ve experienced Google Suggest in action: as you type into the search box, Google offers suggestions that change dynamically as you type each letter of your query. The suggestions are sometimes spookily on target but many times flat-out inappropriate.

You’ll find many examples of Google Suggest inappropriateness documented online. But the Slate contest took a different angle, challenging readers to explore the different suggestions made in response to a “less intelligent” Google query versus a “more intelligent” one.” The winners are in:

The winning entry … follows Google Suggest into the realm of moral inquiry. It doesn’t neatly divide into “less intelligent” and “more intelligent,” but it’s the best example I received of how one word can make all the difference. [Is it wrong to…] involves love affairs, God, and younger men. [Is it ethical to…] puts us on the plane of animal research, privacy concerns, and cooking the books.

Putting aside the entertainment and cultural value of Google Suggest, how does it work? Like most things Google, those details are vague:

Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers.

On the Silverchair SCM web content management platform, we also use autosuggest to aid searchers. But there’s no mystery about how it works. Once three characters have been typed into the search box, our search engine starts matching the query against the index of semantic tags that have been applied to that specific content set from our Cortex biomedical taxonomy. Suggestions become more precise with each query character typed, and because we are matching against only those semantic tags applied to the content, the search results set is always targeted and relevant. Our search engine also checks each query against a database of taxonomy equivalents—synonyms, abbreviations, jargon—to normalize the search query and expand it to cover all possible matches.

Silverchair search autosuggest

Because the content in the products Silverchair builds is tagged so granularly, we can often suggest a more precise term than many searchers start with. Our goals for autosuggest are to save time for users, speed them to the most relevant possible query, and return the most precise answer to their question. Try autosuggest for yourself on the AccessSurgery site we built for McGraw-Hill. Search autosuggest is just one of the many ways a robust taxonomy can promote content discovery.

(I wonder how many of you are running off to play with Google Suggest—a perfect Friday afternoon time-waster…)

Google Suggest

“It turns out that so much gene-swapping has been going on between different kinds of bacteria that neither family trees nor the idea of species make sense.”
Matt Ridley in Wired UK, December 2009 ‘Open Source Evolution’

A few weeks ago I took a one day course on Drupal development.  Drupal is an open source software package for developing content management systems and websites.  I had come across it several months ago and installed it on my home computer just to try it out, and when I saw that I had access to this course I figured that it was a good skill to add to my list.

The course was really good, and it covered a lot of ground, which I appreciated.  I feel like any continuing education that I pursue needs to be really concentrated, and it needs to deliver.  I want to walk out with ideas for things, but also with the skills to implement them.  Theory is great, but I want to do things.

A colleague and I have also installed Drupal on a server at work and we’re looking at it as an internal solution for our workgroup.  We are looking for ways to self-publish, collaborate, and create a repository that others can also use.  We do research within a large organization and we’re trying to refine the way we deliver our work.  Email is fine, but it’s a limited channel that excludes people who aren’t on the address line.  Also, email tends to get deleted, and we think a content management system would solve some of those problems.  We are also hopeful that it will encourage the exchange of ideas across departments, since people can post comments and questions via the Drupal platform.

The aspect of Drupal that I am most interested in is its taxonomy module.  Using the taxonomy module enables the site administrator to create categories with which users can classify the information they publish.  It’s certainly nice to allow some free tagging, and in a large department it’s difficult to predict all of the possible descriptive terms that your users might employ.  But creating some broad subject areas at the outset is a good way to encourage consistency, and consistency makes it easier on the content creator (since they don’t have to come up with terms from scratch), and it makes information retrieval easier because it presents the searcher with topic areas that should look familiar.

Right now we are just using Drupal across a very small user group which makes it much easier to manage.  I hope we can roll it out to a few more people and get their feedback on the site, as well as the taxonomy.  In many ways the organization is lax on the ways it classifies information, and if I can demonstrate the benefit of a solid taxonomy in this one area, it’s possible that I can then advocate for refinement in other areas.  I don’t think that it’s very easy for people to see the benefit of a good scheme of information classification in its absence, so I think it’s my job to demonstrate the good it can do.  Plus, if I want to pursue taxonomy consulting, it will be good to get some experience in my current job that I can point to.  An added benefit is that it will diversity my workday.  Now if they would just let me bring my dog to work…

252331     อนุกรมวิธานของปลา     Fish Taxonomy

ประวัติ หน่วยและระบบ อนุกรมวิธาน ศัพท์บัญญัติและกฎเกณฑ์สากลเรื่องชื่อกับการตั้งชื่อ การเก็บรักษาตัวอย่างปลา ลักษณะของปลาและวิธีการศึกษาเพื่อรวบรวมข้อมูลที่ใช้ในทางอนุกรมวิธาน การใช้เอกสารและรูปวิธานในการวิเคราะห์ชนิดและจัดจํ าแนก หลักการวาดรูปปลาและการเขียนรายงานทางอนุกรมวิธาน

(History, systematic and unit, terminology and scientific nomenclature. Preservation of fishers. Fish characters and methods in sample collection. Classification of fish by literature review and plates. Principles in fish drawing and taxonomic report.)

(252331 มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์)

I was snooping around Google.co.uk the other day, specifically checking out incoming links to a number of websites using the [link:www.blahblahblah.com] operator, and noticed the way URLs are displayed for these results is different for some while others have remained the same.  It looks like the URL taxonomy for certain link: queries return URLs that contain a new symbol: > (they look like breadcrumbs).  Take a look:

I initially thought those URLs that exceeded a certain character length were the ones receiving this updated URL taxonomy, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  I can’t figure out what triggers the new URL structure.  I’m actually leaning toward it being another bit of Caffeine that has made it’s way to the masses.  Have any ideas as to what triggers it?

Update:  Google announced these changes occur when URLs are either too long or too short.  They’re now pulling breadcrumbs to help provide more information to users.  Also, another reason to closely watch the international search engines as this development showed up in Google.co.uk earlier than the official announcement from Google.

So navigation is always used as a buzz word when designing websites. But what is it all about?

Well before we consider the aesthetics of the interface lets take a step back and look at the typology of users and taxonomy of their usage. In other words by looking at who uses the site and what they use it for. By discovering these aspects will help us to develop a useful interface for the consumers and not just sticking a barrage of useless tabs on the top of the webpage.

The best way to analyse this is to take a website and take a look. Take the BBC’s homepage.

There are users who go onto browse the BBC content as the homepage acts as an integration of all the various BBC product offerings through thematic characterising the categories such as Sport, News, Food etc. These people use the site as a leisure site where they can dip in and out of different content.

The site is a complex content management system but the homepage is layed out with all the different products they have on their portfolio. This shows the new viewers all the offerings from the BBC. The problem that the BBC has is that it has so many products to represent all at once. The key consideration the BBC has to tackle is making users aware of all the different aspects to the brand and not just the ones that they are already familiar with. However, you could argue that users do not want to use all the functions and aspects that the BBC has to offer. 

Regular users could  just want a collation of their favourite sections such as Sport. For some users this can be taken further by defining that they only require a certain type of Sport such as Football. More so the exact football team they support. The current website does not offer this to its users. This hinders their usage as they have to click through to micro-subsites to access the information they require.

This can cause two outcomes. Loyal users will save the micro-subsite to their URL favourites to save them trawling through all the links. This way they are not engaging with the rest of the BBC content. But is this important?  What it does show is that the BBC homepage is not serving a particular need for a section of its users. An improvement needed perhaps? Secondly, the users will simple stop using the site as too much fragmentation in ‘flow’ is caused by the click through.

Also another favourite term that makes a lot of brand mangers go frothy at the mouth is user-generated content. To be discussed further.

Relevance is another consideration that a brand must recognise. Take Doritos crisps. They have spent thousands on developing their singing and dancing website with user-generated content and interactive content but just stop and think. Who wants to engage with the packet of crisps they eat? Secondly, if there was a niche of the market that did,  it would have been better to take the brand to them. In this case, selecting a media channel relevant to the typology of user and not just trying to drive traffic to the brand site. Why force the user to go outside of their habits. It’s much likely to be successful to work into the user’s behaviour.

3306625    พฤกษานุกรมวิธานขั้นสูง 1    Advanced Taxonomy Of Vascular Plant I

หลักเกณฑ์การจำแนกประเภทของพืช เน้นการเปรียบเทียบการจำแนกโดยระบบต่างๆ ระบบการจำแนกประเภทโดยอาศัยหลักวิวัฒนาการของการเกิดอวัยวะต่างๆ ของพืช

(Principles of plant taxonomy with emphasis on comparative and experimental techniques; consideration of theory and systems of phylogeny and classification.)

(3306625 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

3306626    พฤกษานุกรมวิธานขั้นสูง 2    Advanced Taxonomy Of Vascular Plants II

หลักเกณฑ์การจำแนกประเภทของพืช และการปรับปรุงข้อมูลในด้านนี้เพื่อให้เหมาะสมกับพรรณพฤกษชาติในประเทศไทย

(Application of taxonomy both theoretically and practically in Thai plants.)

(3306626 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

3308790    อนุกรมวิธานของแบคทีเรีย    Bacterial Taxonomy

การจัดจำแนก การพิสูจน์เอกลักษณ์ และการตั้งชื่อของแบคทีเรีย รวมทั้งความสัมพันธ์ทางวิวัฒนาการ และการเสนอตั้งชื่อสกุลและสปีชีส์ของแบคทีเรีย โดยอาศัยเทคนิคการวิเคราะห์ทางเคมีอนุกรมวิธาน พันธุศาสตร์ และเทคนิคระดับชีวโมเลกุลสมัยใหม่

(Bacterial classification, identification and nomenclature including their phylogeny and the genera and species formation based on the chemotaxonomic, genetic and modern molecular biological techniques.)

(3308790 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)