Taxonomy trends

Google Trends tells us the sad news that taxonomy, ontology, metadata and tagging all enjoyed a peak of search attention in 2004, and have been in slow decline ever since.

For the chart, click here.

At the same time, usage of the terms in news stories has increased, and is now at a peak.

What’s going on here?

At first glance, it might seem that our field hit the peak of inflated expectation in 2004, and is now languishing in the “trough of disillusionment”. Possibly.

But let’s look at Google Trends a bit more closely. Over the same period, almost every geeky term has seen the same decline, even those in widespread use like “Linux” or “PostGres”. Maybe the web is broader now, and therefore geeky terminology is relatively less prominent.

Following the thought, terms relating to Western people and places have also shown relative declines – “New York City”, for example, and “San Francisco”. The same principle could easily apply as the web becomes more global. And on the subject of globalisation, far and away the leading country in ontology is Korea, according to Google.

So I return to Protege without worrying unduly. Time will tell.

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