Madeline

A year ago my boss asked me to find such definitions, as he, the CIO and I
were obviously using conflicting terminology, especially for classification,
file plan, thesaurus and metadata. For example, on the shared drives, I
define metadata to include the terms in the Windows Explorer folder names,
but my boss says metadata is only stuff inside the document itself. He's
wrong, of course. And so are the IT architecture people, the IT data
modellers, records managers and librarians etc etc (grin).

After a couple of days Googling merrily around, I had added
taxonomy, ontology and dictionary to the list of terms I needed to define,
and found several authoritative definitive articles which had ontology at
the top, followed by taxonomy, and file plan and classification as synonyms
much lower down. i had also found other equally definitive authoritiative
articles which had taxonomy at the top above ontology, and didn't mention
file plans at all. Some define file plan as merely the classification with
all the guidance (use, use for, scope notes etc) stripped out. Others
differ. ISO is no help as a lot of their stuff is out of date or very
specialised (eg ISO 15489 is no help at all when I'm covering a much wider
area than just RM). And then you get into even more disciplinary areas such
as project management, where they have similar definitive absolute rules,
which are equally ambiguous. And I won't even mention knowledge management
(don't go there).

At the moment we are calling our project to develop a new corporate-wide,
multi-purpose tool  'naming conventions' to avoid arguments. And at my
insistence it is focusing on naming conventions as an organising and
retrieval tool not distorted by disposal considerations.

So if it's any help I can't help, because there are no standards or
authorities for defining the terminology we use to define out teminology.
Just find or set up something that works, and stick with it. If you find
something I didn't, let us all know!

Good luck.

Glenn

Glenn Sanders
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Australia

These views are mine alone. They may or may not be those of any
previous or present employers or clients. I don't know. If I'd asked
and they'd agreed, I would have signed it "Harry Peck and Co and
Glenn". Or whatever. But I haven't, so I didn't.

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