Hailing a taxonomy – critical core components of a knowledge management system

Pritchard Law Webs has announced that its host (LaVern Pritchard) has created software that prepares a thesaurus/taxonomy. Readers may not appreciate the importance of having a taxonomy if their law department hopes to organize its knowledge, but it is crucial. Or at least that is what I glean from the post.

It notes that “wisely-conceived taxonomies are critical core components of sophisticated expert support systems.” (three nouns and six adjectives!) In other words, if you have no organizing principles for your documents, you will struggle to retrieve them.

Left unanswered for me is whether excellent search engines, like Google Desktop, will do the trick even if there are no taxis in sight.