“Issues in Vocabulary Management” is the latest Technical Report (TR-06-2017) published by the National InformationStandards Organization (NISO), approved on September 25, 2017. I had the honor of serving on its working group, specifically on its subgroup for Vocabulary Use/Reuse. The most significant NISO publication for controlled vocabularies is ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005…
Category: Taxonomy maintenance
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…
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…
Taxonomy Governance
Recently I was asked to speak on a panel on taxonomy governance, so this gave me an opportunity to reflect more on the subject. “Metadata Enhancement for Improved Content Management – Taxonomies and Governance” was the title of a panel I spoke on at the Gilbane Conference 2013: Content and…
Taxonomy Management Consulting
I recently wrote an article on taxonomy management for the online magazine FreePint. By “taxonomy management” I mean taxonomy maintenance, governance, and long-term planning. I’m not going to repeat that article here, because you can look it up. The short version is available without a subscription: “The Care and Feeding…
Taxonomy Merging or Mapping
Yesterday I gave a webinar presentation for members of Taxonomy Division of the SLA professional association, entitled “Taxonomy Updating, Combining, and Translating.” It was not the first time I presented on these topics and on the topic of taxonomy combining (mapping and merging) in particular. What was different this time…