The Cognitive Cost of Classification:
“The mental effort required to consistently assign keywords outweighs the benefits for most frontline contributors to content, document, and knowledge management systems. Contrary to KM World’s recent facets summary, faceted classification can actually compound the problem. Facets are oversold in situations where info-civilians have to classify content that they have created themselves. Expecting facets to solve the metacrap problem is naive.”
And: “faceted classfications multiply the number of decisions required to classify a given document.”
Um, facets aren’t meant to make classifying easier, they’re meant to make finding easier. And I can think of a few ways of how they’d make classifying easier, too - classifying something in 5 facets is not necessarily more cognitively complex than classifying it one place in a taxonomy. I have to disagree with Jess here.
May 2nd, 2005 at 11:26 am
Facets are often *sold* as making classification easier, but I trust you would be able to actually deliver on that (not just sell it). The real point is that high cognitive costs == low compliance when everyday users instead of info-professionals are in charge of classifying documents.
Changing from taxonomy to facets doesn’t really go as far as free tagging in reducing cognitive costs.