many thanks for the ebook link. A hybrid approach sounds like it could be the best of both worlds. I look forward to reading about it.

Steve

We also tend to find that the lists have been made for England. Quite often, Scottish and English law have different terms for the same thing and can even have entirely different set ups.
Even though we have a specifically Scottish Navigation list, the terms used can vary between, say, Dundee and Glasgow. As in England, dialects across the whole country can be very different.
I think, in our case, folksonomy would work really well because council staff can tag the pages with the “council terms” and they can also be tagged with the everyday terms by anyone else.

thanks for comments. I’m intrigued to know whether your team use IPSV because it’s mandated, or whether it is adding real value – e.g. for information sharing between councils, or to support document or records management? As you can see from my original post, I can’t see any practical benefit – unless it is tied to something like EDRMS.

ahh, I should have guessed you would pick up on the Tweeter. I’m certainly intrigued by the course, but as an independent freelancer I have to look careful at cost/benefit. since it’s me that’s paying and not some large corp. Will have a think.

My team find that, even when using deep-level IPSV terms, we have to use standard metadata as well. The main reason being that the vocabulary used is very much based on “council speak” and, even if searchable via google, are not words that non-council people would be familiar with.

Not only that but there are changes in terms that are used depending on location both in terms of dialect (eg yorkshire vs cornwall vs essex, for instance) but also legal terms (Scots law vs english law).

All the various standard vocabularies are much more to do with the national government’s project to have a citizen account and being able to find something on one council site in the same way as we would on another.

Also, folksonomies, especially mature ones, are extremely friendly to search engines, because the people creating the tags are the same people that carry out the searches.