I have blogged before on the difference between tags and categories, but recently someone asked me about the difference between tagging and indexing (the manual kind). It’s not a simple answer.One important way in which tagging and indexing differ is that tagging involves any kind of designation for what a…
The Accidental Taxonomist Blog
Taxonomies vs. Thesauri
Two taxonomy consulting projects I worked on last year seemed to lend themselves more to the development of a thesaurus than a set of hierarchical taxonomies. But clients usually ask for a taxonomy and not a thesaurus. Perhaps we need to ask what is in mind with the notion of…
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…
Information Architecture and Taxonomies
While interest in “information architecture” by that name has declined in the past decade, interest in what information architecture involves continues to be strong, and perhaps there is some merging of the fields of taxonomy and information architecture. At one point in my career I wanted to be an…
Taxonomies and Text Analytics Compared
Last week (September 30 – October 1) I attended the Text Analytics World conference in Boston as an invited speaker. This is the second year was fortunate to present at and attend this conference, which also meets in San Francisco in the spring. I posted a blog about the conference…
Taxonomy Terms with “And”
In considering best practices for developing taxonomy term labels or names, there is the question about the use of the word “and” within taxonomy terms. My previous two blog posts were called “Tags and Categories” and “Card Sorting and Taxonomies,” which demonstrate how common it is to have the word…
Card Sorting and Taxonomies
Card sorting is a common technique in information architecture for developing the organization of menu labels or categories on websites. It would thus seem to be a very suited methodology for developing all kinds of taxonomies, but in actual practice card sorting is not utilized for most taxonomy projects, at…
Tags and Categories
What does a taxonomy comprise and how does it work? Professional taxonomists may speak of “terms,” “nodes,” or “labels,” whereas most other people with a basic understanding of taxonomy might refer to “tags” or “categories.” A category is a well understood concept, and social media sites have made the notion…
How Many Facets
Faceted taxonomies (taxonomies with attributes, dimensions, filters, etc. to limit search results based on the combination of selected criteria) are becoming increasingly popular with the support of web database technology. Unlike traditional hierarchical taxonomies, designing a faceted taxonomy first requires a decision on how many facets to create. There are…
Topics and Document Types in Taxonomies
It’s quite common in a faceted taxonomy to have a Document/Content Type facet (I’ll call DocType here), whose terms define what a content item “is,” (a report, a blogpost, a form, a contract, a letter, a policy, etc.) and also a Topic or Subject facet, whose terms describe what a…