Whatchamacallit: Controlled Vocabularies for Technical Writers
summary
Controlled vocabularies cut retrieval time and restore context by forcing consistent terms, indexing with curated labels (Stack Overflow), publishing a definitional glossary (Twitter), expanding queries with a thesaurus, or narrowing results with a taxonomy. Practical steps are content analysis, card sorting, spreadsheets or dedicated taxonomy tools, and following the SKOS standard. Cautionary example: a deployed browse system failed because a thesaurus drove a taxonomy UI. Work effort and maintenance cost rise with formality.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (13)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:45Whatchamacallit
- 5:31Labels
- 6:47What is useful for
- 18:16Fullfledged terms
- 21:09Finding topics
- 22:09Stack Overflow
- 24:07Card Sorting
- 25:39Taxonomy
- 27:11Refine
- 27:46Example Dcom
- 28:52How to do this
- 29:37Conclusion
related talks
05mControlled Vocabulary
41mOne glossary to rule them all: terminology management at scale
45mTaxonomy inside and outside of Drupal
26mWhat Writing Dictionaries Taught Me about Writing Documentation
42mWhen Jargon Becomes Gibberish
40mDocs Tools for OSS Maintainers
25mKaitlyn Tierney at StaffPlus London 2023
26mCompiled Knowledge for Agentic APIs: Why Your Agents Need a Wiki, Not Just RAG