The design of modern taxonomies tends to involve more lumping, whereas the design of classification systems has involved more splitting
Category: Taxonomy creation
Knowledge Modeling
I recently presented a webinar on “knowledge modeling.” I usually have spoken or written only of creating controlled vocabularies, or more specifically taxonomies, rather than creating knowledge models. Now, I am beginning to think of knowledge models and knowledge modeling. A knowledge model is not just a fancy buzzword for…
Taxonomy Building Steps
What are the steps to take when building a taxonomy? This question was posted not long ago to a discussion group of which I am member. I referred the person asking to slides of one of my past presentations, “Everything You Need to Know to Start a Taxonomy from Scratch.”…
Taxonomy Hierarchy Levels
A taxonomy comprises a hierarchy of concepts (terms), and those hierarchies can be considered to be in different levels. In actuality, levels are somewhat artificial, and its important not to think of levels too strictly. In some taxonomies the levels are even named (for example: Domain, Category, Subcategory, Topic), but…
Engaging Others in Taxonomy Building
Whether you are building a new taxonomy from scratch or redesigning one based on an existing taxonomy, it’s important to engage other people in the process. There are two primary reasons: getting input from those who will use the taxonomy, so that it will better suit their needs getting buy-in…
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…
Taxonomy Term Specificity
One of the challenges in creating or editing taxonomies is determining how specific the terms should be. This is a key issue in making a taxonomy customized for a certain implementation, which involves a unique set of content to be tagged/indexed and a certain set of users. Highly specific terms tend…
Use Cases for Taxonomy Development
Developing use cases in the initial design of a taxonomy is something I did not learn about until I went into consulting, but it is a useful approach to taxonomy and metadata design in any circumstance, regardless of the involvement of an external taxonomy consultant.The use case technique comes from…
Taxonomy Design for Content Management Systems
A very common implementation for taxonomies is in content management systems (CMS). The content managed in this kind of software can be diverse: office application files, PDF documents, image files, audio files, video files, and, in the case of web content management systems, also HTML and any kind of file…
Taxonomies and Tables of Contents
A table of contents and a hierarchical taxonomy appear to be quite similar. In my last blog post I looked at taxonomies and indexes, and in the end concluded: “A taxonomy serves a purpose that is both, or something in-between, that of a table of contents and a back-of-the-book index.…