The Accidental Taxonomist Blog

When to Design a New Taxonomy for a New System

Often organizations determine that a suitable time to adopt a new taxonomy is in conjunction with adopting a new system for its implementation, such as a content management system (CMS) or digital asset management system (DAM). They can budget taxonomy design and development services as part of the consulting services…

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A Multilingual Thesaurus Standard

Standards for taxonomies are of two kinds:1) data models for interoperability and machine-readability, namely SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) published by the W3C, and2) best practices guidelines, which focus on thesauri but are relevant for taxonomies. These are ANSI/NISO Z39.19 and ISO 25964. The International Organization for Standardization will publish…

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Customizing Taxonomy Hierarchies

Taxonomies need to be custom-created for their purposes to be most effective. Basically, a taxonomy comprises the concepts or terms that reflect the subject domain of the content that will be tagged and retrieved with the aid of that taxonomy. Taxonomies must also be customized to the requirements (or limitations)…

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Topical Taxonomies for Filtering Searches

We taxonomists have long been advocating how a taxonomy of disambiguated concepts tagged to content retrieves more accurate results than search algorithms alone. But if users prefer simply entering text strings into a search box and not browsing taxonomies, how best to support users with a taxonomy can be a…

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