Since “taxonomies” are rather loosely defined, standards specifically for taxonomies do not exist, but there are standards that are relevant to taxonomies. A taxonomy is a kind of controlled vocabulary, and there are standards for controlled vocabularies. There are also standards specifically for thesauri, a kind of controlled vocabulary with…
The Accidental Taxonomist Blog
Adjective and Verb Terms in Taxonomies
Terms in a taxonomy are generally nouns or noun phrases, but this does not mean that a taxonomy cannot comprise adjectives or verbs instead. There may be differences of opinion on this, though. A thesaurus, another kind of controlled vocabulary, by contrast, is expected to follow standards (ANSI/NISO Z.39.19 or…
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…
Taxonomies as Knowledge Organization Systems
A taxonomy is a kind of controlled vocabulary. A taxonomy is also a kind of knowledge organization system. So, the question is: what’s the difference, if any, between a controlled vocabulary and a knowledge organization system? When I first heard of “knowledge organization system” I perceived it as merely a…
Avoiding Mistakes in Taxonomy Hierarchical Relationships
Perhaps the most important issue in designing a hierarchical taxonomy is creating hierarchical relationships between terms correctly. This makes the taxonomy intuitively easy to understand and navigate by all kinds of users, regardless of whether they have had any training on using a taxonomy. The basic principles of the hierarchical…
Orphan Terms in a Taxonomy
A taxonomy has hierarchical relationships between all of its terms, so one of the quality control checks on a taxonomy is to ensure that there are no “orphan” terms, which are terms that lack hierarchical relationships. One of the purposes of a taxonomy is for users to be able to…
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…
Popular Topics in Taxonomies
This month marks the 5th anniversary of The Accidental Taxonomist blog, so it is a fitting time to look back and see which posts were most popular. Following are the top 10 posts with the most visits (pageviews) from the time they were published to date, with the number of…
Taxonomy Boot Camp London Conference
I was fortunate to attend and present the inaugural Taxonomy Boot Camp London conference earlier this month. After 11 successful years in the United States (initially in New York in 2005, then for four years in San Jose, CA, and six years in Washington, DC), Taxonomy Boot Camp held its…
Directories and Databases of Published Controlled Vocabularies
A source of published controlled vocabularies (taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, etc.) can be useful for different purposes. Sometimes, finding a vocabulary to license and reuse is the objective, whereas in other cases finding a vocabulary to consult as a source for confirming individual terms and relationships is the goal. Thus, different…