“Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities?” – Walt Whitman, As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario’s Shores

Taxonomists and ontologists are, quite reasonably, obsessed with the is-ness of things. We are, after all, classifiers, and what we classify must be able to conform to one or more categories. A significant factor in categorizing things is time. What is was is not necessarily what is is now.

Time-based categories impact taxonomy concepts in a number of ways, including defining is-ness and the maintenance and governance of is-ness as an ongoing practice.

Is-ness Terms, Business Terms

The subjectivity of is-ness is contextual. When navigating a website, categories are not always strictly semantic in their aboutness because our minds can fill in the blanks. If I navigate to Men’s > Shoes > Basketball, I know not to expect to find basketballs. I also know that basketballs aren’t shoes anymore than shoes are men. My mind fills in any missing words, which might be “Men’s Shoes” or “Shoes for Men”; “Basketball Shoes” or “Shoes for Playing Basketball”. In navigation, we don’t need to be so specific because, in this context, we are less concerned with is-ness than we are about navigational findability.

Even as we describe what things are, our terms may be subjective. What does it mean for a shoe to be a “Lifestyle” shoe? What lifestyle? Whose lifestyle? Similarly, what does it mean to be “Retro”? It depends on the product, the year, and the history of the item. These examples, most importantly, are commonly understood by people based on the immediate context; that is, they are time-based. Loosely speaking, “retro” tends to span 20-30 years…within the lifetime of the consumer. I wouldn’t expect to look for a “Retro” shoe and get a Roman solea (sandal) made of leather and woven papyrus leaves. Retro, for sure, but not what we commonly agree to being retro in the consumer product space.

What people know is slippery, but, somehow, we can commonly understand the difference between concepts with longevity and those which are ephemeral and trending.

The Ephemeral and The Trending

We live in a rapid age, arguably driven by a vast online sales force of young people created by capitalist organizations. Why spend countless millions and human resources on sales and marketing when pre-teens and teens can hype and distribute your product on online social media sites and sales platforms? Some of us have seen in our lifetimes the death of a salesman (that is, a door-to-door sales person) and the rise of the young, entrepreneurial sales people receiving free products, monetary compensation, and social compensation quantified by likes and follows. It’s ingenious, really.

The fast follow to fast following is the vaporous ephemerality of what’s popular and trending. But, hasn’t this always been the case? Weren’t people obsessed with trends and topics in fashion and the public sphere which were very quickly dropped and fell out of awareness in short order? Of course, but the nature of the online race to be ahead of what’s next–to be that trendsetter who identified and pushed the next big thing–is easier in an online world and has immediate social and financial consequences.

Here’s a fairly recent example from Google Trends. “Barbie pink” was a hot topic for several months around the release of the Barbie movie. The movie’s U.S. release date was July 9, 2023 (which, incidentally, is my birthday, and, depending on the source, the birth date of Nikola Tesla). Look at how neatly the searches rise to meet the weeks following the movie’s release and how that trend falls off by Christmas. Likewise, Oppenheimer was released July 17, 2023, and the trend pattern is nearly identical. And, of course, their juxtaposition as “Barbenheimer” follows a similar popularity graph.

If you produce products in pink–any products in pink–you are going to want to jump on that trend and ride the wave until it disappears. When one considers what this means, the ramp-up and execution is significant. Identify all of your pink products and create landing pages so people can find all of those pink products. Make sure these pages can be found with the search term “Barbie pink” without using the word “Barbie”, because you are likely not licensed to do so. Ensure you have enough product to deliver on the increased popularity while also ensuring you are not stuck with a warehouse full of unsold product when the trend tapers off. Logistics of this nature requires foresight, and, most importantly, the infrastructure to deliver on trends.

As for Oppenheimer, it seems there was no fire sale on atomic weapons.

Longevity

The concept of “literary warrant” is an important one in taxonomy creation and maintenance. Literary warrant is the justification for indexing or classifying based on the content of existing literature; literature, in the modern context, extended to electronic and physical writings of all kinds. When we use sources like Google Trends, we can say that this is user warrant: we see what concepts people are actually using and consider adding them to taxonomies.

Taxonomies are never finished. They constantly grow and are governed to maintain currency. Out of date concepts or phrases are deprecated or updated with newer terms. Terms of art may evolve, new areas of study may arise, or social trends may push terminology into or out of use. Taxonomists consider these factors when deciding whether a concept should be added to taxonomies. In general, the goal is to include terms that represent the domain but that also have some stability and aren’t changing rapidly.

Practically speaking, maintaining stability is important because taxonomies which are constantly in flux aren’t very useful. When terms change frequently, there is greater chance that the same or similar content will be tagged using different concepts. Additionally, frequently changing tags on content can be difficult to manage and result in sporadic and chaotic retrievability. From the end user perspective, not knowing which terms to search for or use can result in lower use of taxonomies for metadata application.

So, if trending, ephemeral concepts are useful and taxonomies with stable terms with longevity are also useful, how do we maximize the use of both?

The Ephemeral and The Eternal

For textual problems like trending concepts, machine learning (ML) models are a practical and effective means for identifying and routing terms. Using ML models against sources like user search terms on an organization’s properties, general user search terms across the Internet, user reviews, social media channels, and the like can generate terms which may be useful. Some of these terms are so fleeting, they could feasibly be tagged immediately to content for findability. As the trend wanes, the tag remains, but no longer is critical for retrieving the content. Other terms will have a longer lifespan and may be considered for inclusion in taxonomies.

The main questions to ask are

• What is the term source?
• How and why was it proposed by the ML model?
• Did the ML model compare the term to existing concepts in the taxonomy?
• Did the ML model use only exact match when comparing new concepts to those already in the taxonomy or did it also perform near match or other similarity vectors?
• How is it reviewed for potential inclusion in taxonomies?
• How does the ML model receive and process positive and negative review feedback to improve the model?
• How does the taxonomist know whether to add the term to the taxonomy or not?

Developing a process in which ML models identify ephemeral and trending concepts quickly and can route and act upon these as metadata can speed an organization’s response to trends. Human-in-the-loop reviewers can include subject matter experts for product or content tagging. Importantly for taxonomists, including them as human-in-the loop reviewers for potential candidate taxonomy concepts can help expand taxonomies and maintain their currency.

Maintaining the semantic integrity of taxonomies while also responding quickly to trending topics can improve an organization’s overall reaction to the market while also maintaining clean, quality data. Popular and timely.