Collective taxonomizing: A collaborative approach to organizing document repositories

Keeping large, growing document repositories organized is a critical challenge. For example, the security failure prior to the 9/11 tragedy was partly due to the ineffectiveness of organizing documents shared among various intelligence organizations. Drawing on the success of Web 2.0 and theories from knowledge management, we argue that a shared document repository with no central organizer may benefit from collective taxonomizing: allowing community members to categorize documents with local document hierarchies and systematically coalesce those local hierarchies into a global taxonomy. Using a design science approach, we develop and evaluate a hierarchy coalescing algorithm. Empirical and analytical evaluation shows promise. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.