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About Heather

Hedden Information Management

Taxonomies, Thesauri,
and Controlled Vocabularies

Taxonomy Consulting and Design Services

Hedden Information Management offers the following taxonomy related services:

• Taxonomy/thesaurus design and creation, for:
  • enterprise content management
  • document management
  • web content management
  • website information architecture
  • intranet content
  • digital or electronic publishing
  • digital asset management
  • product information management
  • news feeds
  • SharePoint
  • autoclassification/text analytics and search of unstructued content
• Taxonomy review and evaluation
• Taxonomy design plan review and evaluation
• Taxonomy/thesaurus editing
• Metadata design
• Taxonomy user interface design
• Faceted navigation/search design
• Taxonomy merging, integration, and "mapping" (metadata "crosswalks")
• Autoclassification or machine-aided indexing term rule writing, term "training," and term weighting
• Tagging/indexing guidelines development and authoring
• Taxonomy maintenance and governance policy development and authoring
• Taxonomy/thesaurus software testing and evaluation

  For taxonomy/thesaurus design and creation (first service listed above), service offerings are of two levels:

  1. Taxonomy Design
     Services with the deliverable of complete structure of a new or revised taxonomy, with the top level and second level terms and occasional third level terms. Further detailed building out of the taxonomy would then be done by your in-house subject matter experts. The taxonomy would be documented with guidelines on how to expand and maintain it in a consistent style. To achieve this deliverable, consultant activities include: content analysis, stakeholder interviews, competitor analysis if available, and optionally an interactive design taxonomy workshop. This workshop would differ somewhat from the general taxonomy workshop, since its goal is to come up with a starter taxonomy structure by engaging the participants.
     Duration: weeks
     
  2. Taxonomy Design and Full Taxonomy Building
     An extension of the above services to additionally include the building out of the complete taxonomy, so that it is ready to implement and use. Full taxonomy building services are offered in conjunction with taxonomy design services. The taxonomy will also be documented with guidelines on how to expand and maintain it in a consistent style. Optional add-on services include: (1) indexing or auto-classification analysis and guidelines and (2) taxonomy testing and validation.
     Duration: months
     

  Fees can be charged on an hourly rate (time & materials) or for a project flat fee agreed upon in advance.
  
  

Training in Taxonomy Creation

Standard Courses/Workshops

• "Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies" 5-week online workshop offered through Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science Continuing Education Program.
  Simmons online course information
  
  
• "Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies" 5-week online workshop offered directly by Hedden Information Management to corporate groups of two or more at any time and on a self-paced schedule (shorter or longer than 5 weeks).
  Corporate online course information
  
  
• "Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies" full-day onsite workshop offered at conferences or at your site.
  Conference workshop description
  

Customized Workshops

"Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies" is also offered as a customized workshop of a full-day or split into two consecutive half days. It provides a thorough and in-depth introduction to taxonomy design and construction to any number of participants onsite. Additional participants may teleconference or video-conference in, if you have such capabilities, but the workshop would be targeted at those in the room. Heather Hedden will spend some time prior to the workshop gathering information from your organization in order to tailor the workshop, to exclude what is irrelevant and elaborate on what is more important. The workshop also allows ample time for specific participant contributions. This type of workshop can be part of additional consulting services or independent of any additional consulting services.
(A half-day version of this workshop is available as an option only to local, southern New England clients, where overnight travel is not required for the instructor-presenter.)

Taxonomy Types and Definitions

We often use the single word "Taxonomy" to cover all of the following variations of knowledge organization system. The services and training offered by Hedden Information Management cover all of these.

Controlled Vocabularies
A controlled vocabulary is a restricted list of words or terms used for labeling, indexing or categorizing. It is controlled because only terms from the list may be used for the subject area covered by the controlled vocabulary. It is also controlled because, if it used by more than one person, there is control over who adds terms to the list, when, and how to the list. The list could grow, but only under defined policies. Most controlled vocabularies also have some form of cross-references pointing from one or more “non-preferred” terms to the designated “preferred” term. Only if a controlled vocabulary is very small and easily browsed, such as on a single page, might such synonyms be excluded.

Thesauri
A thesaurus is a more structured kind of controlled vocabulary. It provides information about each term and its relationships to other terms within the same thesaurus. In addition to clearly specifying which terms can be used as synonyms (called “used from”), a thesaurus also indicates which terms are more specific (narrower terms), which are broader, and which are related terms. National and international standards have been developed to provide guidance on creating such thesauri, including ISO 2788, ISO 5964, ANSI/NISO Z39.19. The standards explain in great detail the types of relationships that fall into three types: hierarchical (Broader Term/Narrower Term), associative (Related Term), and equivalence (Use/Used from).

A literature retrieval thesaurus, like a dictionary-thesaurus (such as Roget's) lists similar terms at each controlled vocabulary term entry. The difference is that in a dictionary-thesaurus all the associated terms might be used in place of the term entry depending upon the specific context, which the user needs to consider in each case. But in certain contexts some of these terms are not appropriate. The literature retrieval thesaurus, on the other hand, is designed to be used for all contexts, regardless of a specific term usage or document. The synonyms or near synonyms must therefore be suitably equivalent in all circumstances.

Taxonomies
The word taxonomy means the science of classifying things, and traditionally the classification of plants and animals, as in the Linnaean classification system. It has become a popular term now for any hierarchical classification or categorization system. Thus, we no longer speak of “taxonomy” as a science but rather “a taxonomy” (plural: taxonomies) as a kind of controlled vocabulary that has a hierarchy (broader term/narrower terms), but not necessarily the related-term relationships and other features of a standard thesaurus.

Unlike a thesaurus, where a given term may or may not have broader or narrower terms, in a taxonomy all terms belong to a single, large hierarchy that encompasses all concepts of a certain class, category, or facet. The structure is sometimes referred to as a “tree” and the terms as “nodes” in the tree. Sometimes "a taxonomy" refers to a single hierarchical tree, and sometime "a taxonomy" means the collection of term hierarchies available in combination for searching or browsing a given content repository.

A variation on the form of a collection of hierarchies is a faceted taxonomy. Each facet is its own hierarchy of terms, but actually the terms within a facet do not have to be in a hierarchy and may be a flat list under the facet category label. What distinguishes facets is that the user may select multiple terms, one from each facet, in combination to execute a complex search. Furthermore, facets must represent different aspects or dimensions of a query such as location, topic, source, type, etc.

Ontologies
An ontology is set of concepts with attributes and relationships between the various concepts that contain various meanings, all to define a domain of knowledge, and is expressed in a format that is machine-readable. Certain applications of ontologies, as used in artificial intelligence or biomedical informatics, may define a domain of knowledge through terms and relationships as the end goal, rather than being used for any tagging. In the area of taxonomies and information science, however, an ontology can be seen as a more complex type of thesaurus, in which instead of having simply "related term" relationships, there are various customized relationship pairs that contain specific meaning, such as "owns" and a reciprocal "is owned by."