It seems to me one of the big holes in our knowledge of information architecture, one of the main holes in fact, is how taxonomies become navigation. We’re starting to develop very good methods for arriving at taxonomies for modern websites, and we’re also getting better at determining what characteristics are apparent in successful navigation. But that junction of taxonomy and navigation still seems to be part of the black art of IA, the challenge of marrying the bottom-up to the top-down.

I’d like to try, and I’m starting to think about how it might be done. If you’ve seen this sort of thing done already please let me know. Thanks.

(I later realize Brett’s Ontology Development and Relationship Modeling for Enterprises and Enterprise Websites will discuss this. I’m not sure if it’ll be a general system that discusses various navigation schemes in relation to an ontology, but it’ll certainly act as one example.)

Also interesting that on Peterme’s sidebar he mentions as a current interest ‘figuring out how to marry top-down task-based information architecture processes with bottom-up document-based ones.’ I think this is one of the central issues in information architecture today.