Taxonomy

Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer. - IBM Training Manual 1925

Our scientific understanding of any topic is founded upon taxonomic processes: we take things apart to see how they work. We can gain a better understanding of the intricate parts of a whole system by examining its parts and then combine them together, gradually coming to understand how those parts interrelate.

In a very basic sense, what a content reuse system does is to divide up content scientifically into associative, functional, or structural taxons¹. This taxonomy of information makes useful reuse feasible. The application of this useful taxonomy to enterprise information is what determines whether the content reuse system produces benefits for the organization or becomes just another expensive good idea.

All learning objects are defined by taxonomies. These taxonomies express the way in which each object is understood, used and maintained. In evaluating how to construct learning object models for an XML repository, it is very important to understand that these are used to define queries. The value of the system depends upon the ease and accuracy of queries. Many organizations discovered too late that they had expended substantial resources in creating an XML (or SGML) repository that provided no additional benefit over cutting and pasting documents from a file server. This is because their content authors could not find anything that was placed into the repository.