A defining characteristic of taxonomies is that terms/concepts are arranged in broader-narrower hierarchies, which may resemble tree structures. A limited number of top concepts each have narrower concepts, which in turn may have narrower concepts, etc., and the narrowest concepts at the bottom of the hierarchy are sometimes referred to…
Category: Hierarchical taxonomy
Hierarchies in Taxonomies, Thesauri, Ontologies, and Beyond
Hierarchies vary depending on the kind of knowledge organization system, so you cannot assume that a hierarchy in one system converts to a hierarchy in another system
When a Taxonomy Should not be Hierarchical
The traditional taxonomy is hierarchical. Thus, after it is determined a taxonomy is needed, often it is thought that it should be designed as a hierarchy. However, in practical terms, a hierarchical taxonomy might not be the kind that is appropriate. A taxonomy provides value (1) as a controlled vocabulary…
Taxonomy Hierarchical Relationship Issues
A common feature of taxonomies is the hierarchical relationship between terms. Terms are linked to each other in a relationship that indicates that one is the broader term (BT) of the other, and in the other direction, one is the narrower term (NT) of the other. You don’t need to…
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…
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…
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…
Taxonomies vs. Thesauri: Practical Implementations
The differences between taxonomies and thesauri and when to implement which has been a subject of previous presentations of mine and a previous blog post, Taxonomies vs. Thesauri. Most recently, a presentation of a case study of controlled vocabularies at Cengage Learning, which I gave at the “Taxonomy Café” session…
Polyhierarchy in the SharePoint Term Store
Last year I had the opportunity to create some taxonomy in the SharePoint Term Store (also called Managed Metadata), and while I am pleased that hierarchical taxonomies are supported in this widely used platform, I had some concerns about the support of polyhierarchy, as information about this capability is inconsistent.…
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.…