A brief prosaic elegy to my role of a year, a.k.a my brief stint as a budding (IT sense of) Ontologist
Those of you familiar with my LinkedIn profile, not to mention my prior post from early 2018, would not fail to notice that the stability I'd enjoyed in the field of SEO consulting showed signs of being disturbed. Specifically, I took a scenic detour into the realm of (the IT sense of) Ontologies and Taxonomies.
Recently, my spouse asked me how I'd describe the post-SEO role I'd held for 12 months. Promptly, I replied that my mission was to extend and develop a set of ontologies that would serve as the framework for taxonomies both used and potentially useful to my employer's Marketing division.
At this point, it would be helpful for me to step back and put that in less abstract terms, I'm thinking.
While most people are familiar with taxonomies from taking a unit of animal species classification - where we heard of things like Phylum and Genus, there is a vital need for such entities in categorizing and managing every type of content. Furthermore, not all taxonomies need be strictly hierarchical: I recommend this enjoyably humourous infographic example, rap artists' names arranged in a taxonomy.
Take e-commerce sites, for instance. Most web experiences that require the visitor to segment themselves - in other words, dig deeper into the site structure to find specific items, services, etc. strive to provide navigational options, often with facets, to improve their user experience.
Those options and facets can be canonicalized using ontologies, which allow us to define the types and attributes and their interrelationships. The actual values of those selectable items or descriptors are, or should be, curated taxonomic values.
Over the year I spent adjusting my worldview from an SEO-grounded content marketer, to one that started noticing lists and missing taxonomies everywhere, I barely had the chance to build the level of expertise I believed the role deserved. However, just as SEO practitioning has permanently altered how I experience websites, it's left an indelible mark on how I try to mentally grapple with related concepts and curate them, be it for my new role or in my personal activities. In retrospect, that I didn't strictly adhere to the Dewey Decimal System when arranging my book collection in childhood indicates that I was already a nascent ontologist.
Recently, my spouse asked me how I'd describe the post-SEO role I'd held for 12 months. Promptly, I replied that my mission was to extend and develop a set of ontologies that would serve as the framework for taxonomies both used and potentially useful to my employer's Marketing division.
At this point, it would be helpful for me to step back and put that in less abstract terms, I'm thinking.
While most people are familiar with taxonomies from taking a unit of animal species classification - where we heard of things like Phylum and Genus, there is a vital need for such entities in categorizing and managing every type of content. Furthermore, not all taxonomies need be strictly hierarchical: I recommend this enjoyably humourous infographic example, rap artists' names arranged in a taxonomy.
Take e-commerce sites, for instance. Most web experiences that require the visitor to segment themselves - in other words, dig deeper into the site structure to find specific items, services, etc. strive to provide navigational options, often with facets, to improve their user experience.
Those options and facets can be canonicalized using ontologies, which allow us to define the types and attributes and their interrelationships. The actual values of those selectable items or descriptors are, or should be, curated taxonomic values.
Over the year I spent adjusting my worldview from an SEO-grounded content marketer, to one that started noticing lists and missing taxonomies everywhere, I barely had the chance to build the level of expertise I believed the role deserved. However, just as SEO practitioning has permanently altered how I experience websites, it's left an indelible mark on how I try to mentally grapple with related concepts and curate them, be it for my new role or in my personal activities. In retrospect, that I didn't strictly adhere to the Dewey Decimal System when arranging my book collection in childhood indicates that I was already a nascent ontologist.
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