I just attended the HR Technology Conference this week, my first time at an industry or functional specialty conference, so it was interesting to learn how taxonomies could be positioned within this specialized sector. I usually speak or write about taxonomies as useful in general knowledge and information management, with the only specialization discussed in ecommerce. Human resources…
Category: Taxonomy uses
Industry Uses for Taxonomies
It’s always interesting to hear about new and different uses of taxonomies. For example, recently I learned that a company would like a taxonomy in a way I had not heard before: to help their RFP team find content more efficiently to put together its responses to RFPs (request of…
Taxonomy Terms for Different End-Users
The names of taxonomy terms need to be understood by the taxonomy’s users, and all users need to share the same understanding of what the term means. Typically, a taxonomy as two fundamental sets of users: those who tag content with the taxonomy terms and those who retrieve content with…
Subject Searching: Why a Taxonomy, Thesaurus, or Controlled Vocabulary Still Helps in the Age of Search
Subjects, topics, index terms, keywords, controlled vocabulary, thesaurus, taxonomy. These all refer to an organized, precise way to find and retrieve desired information, where that information has been indexed to terms. Indexing content with subject terms can be manual or automated, but in either case the focus is on what…
Auto-categorization and Taxonomies
Taxonomies and thesauri are only truly useful if their terms are appropriately indexed or tagged to content. My path to taxonomist had been as an indexer, so I always value the importance of human indexers. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge that automated indexing, also called auto-categorization, is becoming increasingly common and…
Taxonomies for Specific Business Needs
Designing controlled vocabularies to meet specific business needs was the topic of my latest conference presentation at Taxonomy Boot Camp London on October 17. There are two aspects to this topic: (1) the type of controlled vocabulary to choose, and (2) whether to have the same controlled vocabulary or distinct…
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…
Taxonomies and Terminologies
The current specialties of taxonomy management and terminology management have different histories and serve different purposes, but they are in fact closely related, and taxonomies and terminologies can be linked to share knowledge. At the annual Taxonomy Boot Camp conference in Washington, DC, earlier this month I met a terminologist…
Taxonomies and Indexes
Taxonomies and indexes are similar in that they both help guide people to find desired information on a selected topic. While they could be searched, they are designed specifically to be browsed. The obvious difference is that taxonomies for end-users are arranged hierarchically (or by facets), and indexes are arranged…
Taxonomies for Indexing Images
It’s becoming more common to index images with taxonomy terms, instead of just text documents or instead of just keyword-tagging of images. A taxonomy for the subject-indexing of images need not be significantly different than a taxonomy for indexing textual documents, but other metadata differs, and the indexing activity is…