The Accidental Taxonomist Blog

Taxonomies for Content Components

The primary purpose of taxonomies is to support consistent topical tagging (indexing) of content and full and accurate content retrieval based on the tagged taxonomy concepts that the end-user selects. The unit of content that is tagged makes a difference in the retrieval results and user experience. Users want to…

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Taxonomy and Information Architecture Compared

There is considerable overlap between the fields of information taxonomies and information architecture. Both involve information organization, labeling, search, and findability. In some organizations the job roles and titles are combined. I previously blogged on “Information Architecture and Taxonomies,” observing that “information architecture” in name seemed to be declining while…

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Related Concepts in Taxonomies

Taxonomies and thesauri are characterized by having hierarchical relationships linking their terms. The associative relationship (related concepts, Related Term, or RT), on the other hand, is a fundamental feature of thesauri, but it is merely an optional feature of taxonomies. An over-simplistic distinction between taxonomies and thesauri is the presence…

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Taxonomies vs. Ontologies

The question often comes up: how are taxonomies and ontologies different? While there are some short simple answers (such as: taxonomies are hierarchies, and ontologies are semantic networks), it is understandable that the distinction is not that clear. There is considerable overlap. Ontologies may contain taxonomies, and taxonomies can be…

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Taxonomies to Bridge Silos

There is increasing interest in organizations to “break down silos” of content and data. Silos may be different software applications, distinct web or intranet content, or merely different computer drives and folders. The goal is to enable search and retrieval across content that is stored in different content/document management systems…

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The Accidental Taxonomist, Third Edition

The third edition of my book, The Accidental Taxonomist, will officially be published November 7, but discount preorders are now being accepted for both print and ebook, and I just received  advance printed copies, so now is a good time to talk about. Details of the book are on its website. For those who…

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Taxonomies and Semantics

How are taxonomies related to “semantics”? I considered this question, as the latest conference I participated was SEMANTiCS,  the European conference of semantic technologies, which took place this year in Vienna, Austria, September 13 – 15. Topics presented and discussed in this conference included ontologies, knowledge graphs, semantic models and…

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