LaVern Prichard's Legal Technology News article Knowledge Management: Multi-Dimensional Knowledge explains how he made his LawMoose
site more useful by shifting to a thesarus-based topic categorization
system, instead of a conventional topic-subtopic system. Here's an
excerpt:
[I]n our thesaurus-powered legal knowledge
collection, resources appear under as many topics as make sense without
having to duplicate them. Topics interconnect with other topics in as
many ways as make sense. Sometimes we place a sub-topic under two
broader topics instead of just one. And, most importantly, each topic
is enriched and rendered more usable by a host of “related” links
connecting a topic to others logically related to it. These connections
would simply be “outside the grid” of an outline style hierarchical
directory.In the year that followed, we increased the number of topics we
published by 400 percent from 250 to 1,000 and the number of resources
by 1,300 percent, from 600 when we launched to 8,000 a year later.Our collection of knowledge grew denser with interconnections. You
can now locate tens of millions of relevant pages on the Web via our
knowledge map — not because we have indexed the pages into a search
engine, but because we have identified key intersections, entry points,
and Web destinations. And created, over time, a detailed map of how to
get to them, directly, or through one of the resources we list.