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.…
Category: Taxonomy creation
Taxonomy Courses
Note: Since this blog post was written, Simmons College discontinued its continuing education program. I am now offering the 5-week online workshop, previously offered through Simmons, independently through Hedden Information Management. Information is at: http://www.hedden-information.com/taxonomy-workshop-online.htm __________________________________________________________________________ I have been teaching workshops on how to create taxonomies for over seven years.…
One or More Taxonomies
In the various definitions of taxonomy, one aspect of the definition that is often missing is what constitutes a single taxonomy (or thesaurus) versus multiple related taxonomies (or thesauri). If you hire a taxonomy consultant, they won’t tell you because they will defer to their client’s terminology. If you are…
Creating Taxonomies from Scratch
When I first got into taxonomy work, my impression was that the trend was increasingly to revise, redesign, merge, and update existing taxonomies and less for creating new taxonomies. As taxonomies became more common in large organizations, it seemed obvious that there would be less original taxonomy creation needs and…
Indexing vs. Thesaurus Creation
The activities of back-of-the-book indexing, document/digital asset indexing, and thesaurus/taxonomy creation all require similar skills, but each has its own unique requirements. Indeed a typical career path toward an accidental taxonomist is to first work as an indexer. You might think that the two kinds of indexing are similar to…
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…