© 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved
Naming Documents (or is it “Document, Naming”?)
Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself. Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet Act II, Scene 2
We normally only use
the bold portion of
the famous Shakespearean quote above, but it is really out of context. As
the play unfolds, we learn that a name is all too powerful. Indeed it is because of their names that
the doomed lovers die. There might be life and death in a name (BTW, when I wrote this monogram, I was in Hatfield, PA. Remember
the Hatfields and
the McCoys?) This is a bit extreme, but in
the field of Knowledge Management (KM) names are of
the utmost importance as well.
When I write an article about managing SharePoint sites, how should I name it? “Managing a site” or “Site, managing”? Nine times out of ten I’d opt for
the latter. Almost everything we do is “Managing” so to make life easier for a person looking for meaningful content, we title our articles starting with
the differentiator rather than
the common factor. As a rule of thumb, we start
the name with
the noun rather than
the verb. It is not what we do that is
the primary key; it is what we do it to.
So, answer this – is it a “rule of thumb” or a “thumb rule?” This is tough. A lot of what we do when naming is a judgment call. Both thumb and rule are nouns, albeit concrete and abstract (more about this later), but to most people “thumb rule” is meaningless while “rule of thumb” is an idiom.
The difference between knowledge and information is that knowledge is meaningful information placed in context. Thus I elect
the “rule of thumb”. It is
the more meaningful title.
Abstract and Concrete are relative terms. Many nouns (and verbs) that are abstract to a commoner, are concrete to a practitioner of one profession or another and may even have different concrete meanings in different professional jargons. Think about “running”. To an executive it means running a business, to a marathoner its meaning is much more literal. Generally speaking, we store and disseminate knowledge
within a practice more than we do it in general. Even dictionaries encyclopedias define terms as they apply to different audiences.
The rule of thumb is to put
the more concrete first, but
within the audience’s jargon.
Even
the title of this monogram is a question. Do I name it “Naming Documents” or “Documents, Naming”? Well, my own rule of thumb (“Here he goes again!?”) states that
the latter is better because it starts with a noun, but this is a document about naming more than it about documents.
The rules of naming also apply to graphs and charts, excel spreadsheets, and so on. Thus, I vote for
the former. A better title could have been “Naming Objects” only
the word “Object” is a bit too abstract. How about just “Naming” or “Naming, rules of”? You get
the drift.
One of
the ways to resolve all of this is to store
the documents in Knowledge-Bases, which may become
the subjects of a future punditry. Knowledge bases use keywords to describe their content. Use a Metadata store for
the keywords to at least attempt some common grounds. Here is another general rule (rule of thumb?!!) – put at least
the one keyword in
the title.
Use subtitles. Here is an example: Migrating documents – Screening, cleaning, and organizing our knowledge.
The main keyword is “documents”, next is “migrating”, other keywords also appear in
the subtitle. They are “screening”, “cleaning”, and “organizing”.
Any questions? Send me an amply named document by email:
[email protected]