Subjects, topics, index terms, keywords, controlled vocabulary, thesaurus, taxonomy. These all refer to an organized, precise way to find and retrieve desired information, where that information has been indexed to terms. Indexing content with subject terms can be manual or automated, but in either case the focus is on what…
Category: Faceted taxonomy
Taxonomies for Filtering and Sorting
Taxonomies are versatile and may be used for various purposes. Originally designed to support hierarchical browsing of topics linked to content, they also may be implemented to support more accuracy in searching. Most discussions of taxonomies have focused on browse and/or search, but taxonomies may function in additional ways: enhancing…
Taxonomies in SharePoint
Controlled vocabulary metadata, including hierarchical taxonomies, has been supported in SharePoint since its 2010 version, and its use and features have been enhanced is succeeding versions of SharePoint. While it’s not technically difficult for users to create taxonomies and apply their terms to content items in SharePoint, developing a metadata/taxonomy…
Metadata and Taxonomies
Metadata and taxonomies are related. In The Accidental Taxonomist, 2nd edition (pp. 15-18), I explain that most, but not all, taxonomies (not purely navigational taxonomies) serve to populate terms/values in metadata fields/elements; and some, but definitely not all, metadata fields are populated by terms/values from controlled vocabularies or, more specifically,…
How Many Facets
Faceted taxonomies (taxonomies with attributes, dimensions, filters, etc. to limit search results based on the combination of selected criteria) are becoming increasingly popular with the support of web database technology. Unlike traditional hierarchical taxonomies, designing a faceted taxonomy first requires a decision on how many facets to create. There are…
Topics and Document Types in Taxonomies
It’s quite common in a faceted taxonomy to have a Document/Content Type facet (I’ll call DocType here), whose terms define what a content item “is,” (a report, a blogpost, a form, a contract, a letter, a policy, etc.) and also a Topic or Subject facet, whose terms describe what a…
E-Commerce Taxonomies
Happy Cyber-Monday! Coincidentally, this week, which is cyber-week for some retailers, I am giving a conference presentation, at Gilbane in Boston on November 29, on “Taxonomies for E-Commerce.” As online shopping grows, the organization of products for sale on e-commerce websites becomes increasingly important, and there is also more standardization.…
Enterprise Taxonomies vs. Traditional Taxonomies
A book that I have been reading (Structures for Organizing Knowledge: Exploring Taxonomies, Ontologies, and Other Schemas, by June Abbas, 2010) got me thinking about the comparison between corporate/enterprise taxonomies and other “traditional taxonomies”. I found it intriguing that Abbas presents corporate or “professional” taxonomies in the same chapter on…
Faceted Search vs. Faceted Browse
If you have considered different kinds of taxonomies, you have undoubtedly come across the faceted type. You can remember what a facet is by thinking of “face,” as in a multi-faceted diamond. Other names for facet include dimension, aspect, or attribute. It could be the set of characteristics that describe…
From Folders to Facets
A recent taxonomy project I completed involved creating a new taxonomy for a financial services client who was migrating its internal content from shared drive folders to a SharePoint-based intranet, which also included automated indexing and a search engine (FAST). The new taxonomy will help support the search functionality, and…