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Knol Category Browsing

You can browse knols by categories, as part of Knol Search

What are Knol Categories?

Categories are the Knol community's way of classifying knols. It allows readers to quickly find and navigate to knols and topics of their interest.

Categories can be assigned to a knol by the authors of the knol, or by the community of readers. When you are assigning categories, you are putting knols into groups related by common subject matter.

Who can assign Categories?

Authors

An author assigns a knol to a category by clicking on the Add a category link. That is located in the middle of the right hand side, below the Related Knols list.

"Add a category" is highlighted in red.
Click on the image to expand it.

As an author, you should only put a knol into relevant categories. If you want to remove a category, click on the Remove link to the left of where it is displayed. We will show at most six categories on any knol page. When the knol community has assigned more than six categories to a knol, we display only the most popular category assignments.

Readers

Readers can assign categories to knols. The categories you assign will show up under "Your categories" when you are logged in to Knol.

This also helps the Knol community. When you add a category, you are adding your vote to help decide what categories a knol actually belongs in.

To do this, log in to Knol, then follow the same process as an author to add or remove categories.

Categories assigned by authors generally take precedence over categories assigned by readers.

Google's algorithm

If a knol has no categories assigned to it, we may automatically assign it to categories based an algorithm which classifies the documents into a subset of categories from the Open Directory Project hierarchy. This process of categorization is internal to Knol, we do not publish or broadcast knols into http://www.dmoz.org/. Because this is a mechanical process and involves no direct human judgment, the categories assigned by Google may sometimes be inaccurate. Authors are encouraged to delete these categories and replace them with more accurate categories.

Note: for the first few days after launching Category Browsing on February 4, 2009, we expect the initial categories to be incorrect, and to fluctuate a great deal.

Best practices for categorizing knols

  • Pick several of short words or phrases that accurately describe the knol. A knol can be part of several categories.
  • Be accurate.
  • Be consistent.
    • Reuse the same categories names, to put similar knols into the same bucket.
    • If certain category names are already in use, try to avoid inventing slight variations with the same meaning. So if there is a category called "united states politicians", use that rather than creating your own category "united states political figures".
  • Avoid rare or unusual category names. Such categories won't often appear within the category browser, making your content harder to find.

Category assignments are public information

The categories you assign should be considered public not private information. Individual's category assignments are not yet searchable or inspectable, but it eventually will be as part of your public profile. Anyone should be able to see what assignments you have performed. So the categories you assign will affect your reputation within the knol community. Category assignments are subject to our Terms of Service and Content Policy.

Browsing the category tree

When you search for knols, you will see a tree on the left side of the search results page. This tree shows the list of categories related to your search results. Now you can refine your search by clicking on a category name shown in the tree.  So, for example, if you click on recreation, then your search is constrained to only the knols which have been classified under the "recreation" category. The search results are updated as you click on the tree, to reflect the category you are browsing.

If you see a knol in the search results that you like, click on it to read it!
.
Otherwise, you can refine your category search. Click on a category to expand the sub-categories, or click on a sub-category to refine your search. Then, the search results will include knols containing the main category and the sub category.

The category tree is not fixed, or static. It is dynamic. It depends on what search query you start with. So if you start by searching for [java], you are exploring a different tree than if you search starting with [computers].

FAQs about Categories

Does the case or capitalization of a category name matter?

The case of a category does not affect what results are returned by search. So, for example, "Political Science" is the same category as "political science".

How do you choose what categories appear in the category browser? Categories X, Y, and Z are missing!

There are two aspects to determining what is in the category browser. One side is driven by the community of knol authors and readers, who place knols into categories by assigning category keywords to the knol.  So, if a category is missing—the knol author community is in control. Write articles for that category, and label knols with that category. The more documents exist in a category, the more likely that category is to appear in the browser.

The other side is what we do, by an algorithm that builds a tree "on the fly". The computational question is, for a given set of documents (defined by a language or a query), what is the set of categories which cover the largest number of knols. That set of categories becomes one layer of the tree. There are, of course, more  details to the algorithm, and it is subject to change and refinement at any time.

How can I make subcategories?

You cannot. Just label a knol with several meaningful categories, and it will be findable under some or all of them.

Not a satisfying answer? Well, here is another explanation of what is happening. Each knol has a list of categories that authors and readers have labeled it as belonging to. All categories are created equal but some are more popular than others, there are no subcategories. So at this particular instant (2/24/2009), a knol on "Color Blindness Tests" may be found under Entertainment > Vision Care. Or you can find it by at Vision Care > Entertainment, if you start with the query: incategory:"vision care". More popular categories are more likely to be discovered as "parents" and less popular categories are more likely to be found as "children" in the tree view, but their is no actual parent-child or superior-subordinate relationship between them. The Category Browser is a hierarchical interface into a non-hierarchical data set.

What if I don't want categories on my knol, can I just turn them off?

Yes, you can turn off the categories display on individual knols, as described here.

I just want to categorize my knols the way I want. Can I stop visitors from assigning or removing categories?

Yes, you can prevent visitor editing of categories, as described here.


Tell us what you think

If you have any ideas on improvement or see any categories you don't like, please post your comments here.

Comments


Thanh N. Truong

Add Chemistry category

Under Science category, please add Chemistry and Under Chemistry, please add Computational Chemistry. I have a number of articles would like to share in this domain.

Last edited Nov 5, 2009 10:02 AM
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Mark Jones

knol concept needs a big tweak

hi guys,

Congratulations on this great initiative. something I have been thinking about here in the uk for a while. ( I am a 54 year old teacher of science, parent, and educator with experience at Teachers TV and the BBC digital curriculum, have also done education work for the European Space Agency ). User of google since it began.

In dicussions with the Open University I made a proposal they were interested in, hope you are too.

Knowledge exists at many "levels" of difficulty.. I propose that a user is free to self categorise (or not) their piece of knowledge at one of, or a selection from, 10 levels. This could also be added later and/or voted on and altered by others. Pitched for an average student in the middle of the range. So a very bright 7 year old might choose to read college materials , or a parent might look for easy treatments of topics, whilst a researcher might stick to research level materials.

A reader would be free free to roam (search) at one level, several levels, or all levels. Eg "at this level and one above" or "at this level and one above, and one below". This feature made visual and easy to access.

The great benefit of this is that you can browse at roughly the level of difficulty that suits your purpose.

This woud improve user satisfaction levels, and increase access for those struggling with English or with learning difficulties, as well as everyone else including professors and child prodigies, teenagers, and anyone else.

Levels might be:

very simple ( infant / very young child say 0-3 ) VS 0
simple (young child say 3-5) S 1
easy ( say 5-7) E 2
moderate (7-10) M 3
junior high (10-13) JH 4
high school (14-16) HS 5
college (17-19) CO 6
undergrad UG 7
graduate GR 8
postgrad accessible PG 9
reaserch / specialist RS 10

I know this sounds like a pain but done visually it could be very quick, easy , and intuitive. The result -especially if done from near the start of your project - could be extremely powerful and useful.

I might be good to have a colour code or "slider bar" for people to select the vevel of difficulty.

For example, it would help the academic scientific community. But their work would also be searchable, and findable, and browsable, in a useful way, by others. It would also help the student to find a level of difficulty they are comfortable with, and stick with that. A "general interest" tab might categorise as levels 3 to 5 . Who knows, the whole web might eventually decide to fall in with this system! It is certainly a problem currently when browsing the web, that materials at all ranges of difficulty pop up. The google search engine could be adapted to offer this feature as an option - limit searches to a certain range of difficulty levels - onece a significant amount of material had been graded (assuming the idea takes off).

SECOND point: could you create a personal productivity home page which helps me to organise my own knowledge activities better?

Tools I want: notepads; searchable lists; calendar; clock; document viewer, video viewer, calculator, possibly a spreadsheet, and a very simple webpage authoring notebook to create and edit organise and store lists of web links. Others would want twitter , facebook,etc, news and weather, whatever. NO ADVERTS! I would end up paying an annual subscription but eventually, it would be well worth it.

Cheers.

Mark E Jones


Last edited Aug 21, 2009 5:12 AM
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Anonymous

Untitled

Environment Pollution / Deterioration needs to be a category of high priority in Knol.For me the survival of mankind now rests on how much,how quickly and how adversely the mankind as a whole affect our own environment around us all.Nature creates a conducive surroundings for any given situation to sustain but we on the basis of our proud force of science and the marketting penetrations into human mindset by corporate joints, create un-natural surroundings conducive to damages and unforseen catastrophies.To remidy ,then we use the same brute force of science for the aversion of these self created threats and last but not least are bound to fail miserably in the end.So, it is time to stand up by mankind against the commercial appetite of corporate monsters.We do not need luxury and amenities, we need simple life with spiritual values and belief. we are being lead only to a blind alley of materialism without any end.We must focus and target our final goals of life on this earth.When and if we do it, we will not decide for such wrongs. But we are being pushed without given moments to focus. So, the jinny of mateial pollutions of all kinds is staring us in the face, the mabkind, to engulf any moment.

Last edited Jun 12, 2009 7:29 AM
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Alberto Auné

Categories

There are others systems of categories that are very interesting and universal.
For example the theme categories of UNESCO.
Also the categories that use the libraries in all the world: International Series Book Number (ISBN); also is another instrument of categories for publications as newspapers.
If the ISBN or newspapers categories are included will be an interesting relation between the real and the virtual worlds.

Alberto Auné

Last edited May 28, 2009 6:22 PM
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Patrice Bouyrat

About Copyright.

Hi,
I've translated a lot of yours help page into the french language. I did it because the licence was CC-attribution, and it was easy to use the same pictures (I don't do screenshot)
So now, all the new help-page are under Copyright licence. In this way, I'm asking you "what about if I translate the others help-page?".
What kind of license I must applicate?
What can I do?

ps: my english is not as good as my french :-)

Last edited May 6, 2009 4:38 PM
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Craig "Meathead" Goldwyn

Wen need a Food & Drink Category

This can encompass cooking, nutrition, shopping, dining out, wine, etc.

Last edited Apr 30, 2009 6:18 AM
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Anonymous

Categorías y Entendimiento

No me permite (este sitio) ingresar: "Inventivas, Tecnologías Ecológicas y de Reciclado y Aprovechamiento De-y-Para Generación de Energías Alternativas, Mecánica-Fabricación, Foro Para Un País Mejor, Apicultura, Fotografía", como mis categorías.
No encontré (en español --mi idioma--) explicación sobre el tema, ni información interesante para conocer más de esta novedad de "KNOL". Lo único que logré enterarme fue en: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol. ¿alguien podría ayudarme a completar mi "Knol"?, GRACIAS.
Perdón por mi ignorancia, pero preferiría tener bloqueado cualquier artículo y/o comentario en cualquier idioma que no sea castellano.

Last edited Apr 21, 2009 9:20 AM
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