langreiter.com plain, simple: 2005-03-14-additivity

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2005-03-14-additivity

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 7286 days AGO

Controlled Vocabularies Cut Off the Long Tail

Serendipity, additivity and our friend-du-jour, The Long Tail.

"Controlled vocabularies are, at their finest, a best guess, not an artifact of actual behavior. However, we have many techniques to make controlled vocabularies more user-friendly as we design them: card-sorting, advanced card sorting, synonym dictionaries, variant terms, best bets, mental models. The problem with these techniques, however, is that they’re too deliberate to be inclusive. Someone has to deliberately program the system to show "jeans" when a user types in the variant term "dungarees". Not only is this expensive and selective, in most systems there is little or no support for it."