As taxonomies become more common for information management and retrieval in all kinds of organizations and in various applications, the task of creating new taxonomies from scratch is less needed than the task of managing existing taxonomies. What is required for taxonomy management, however, might not be completely clear. I’ve…
The Accidental Taxonomist Blog
Taxonomy Design Research
I recently wrote an article “Taxonomies: Connecting Users to Content” for an online publication, Boxes and Arrows, on information architecture (IA) and user experience (UX). As I was working with the editors on the section of gathering information from users, I realized that IA and UX have very formalized researcher…
Taxonomy Trends
Last fall I gave an 8-minute video presentation as part of the SEMANTiCS Video Forum 2020 on the subject of taxonomy trends, but the short talk allowed time to discuss only two of the past year’s trends. More recently, I reflected on longer-term trends in taxonomies when the chair, Jane…
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…
Who Should Create Taxonomies?
More and more organizations of various types and sizes are recognizing the benefits of information/content taxonomies, to make it easier to more accurately and quickly find information, be recommended information, and be able to formulate complex queries of data. In many cases, however, where taxonomies are not central to the…
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
Differing Definitions of Ontologies
In my last blog post I discussed the different definitions and features of thesauri. Now, I will turn to the next kind of knowledge organization system in the spectrum of complexity: ontologies. Actually, to consider an ontology as a more (or most) complex type of controlled vocabulary or knowledge organization…
What is a Thesaurus and What is it Good For
A thesaurus has the benefits of supporting more semantics than a taxonomy while not being as complex as an ontology.
Customizing Taxonomy Facets
It has become more common to design faceted taxonomies than purely hierarchical taxonomies, as I discussed in a previous blog post. Faceted taxonomies integrate better with search, serve for filters and sorting, and provide a good user experience for both novices and subject matter experts. The main drawback is that…
Adjectives as Terms in Taxonomies
Taxonomies need not follow strict standards, but rather best practices. There are standards for thesauri (ANSI/NISO Z39.19 and ISO 25964), and as taxonomies are similar to thesauri, it’s a good idea to follow thesaurus standards for taxonomy design to the extent applicable. According to thesaurus standards, terms should be nouns…