A taxonomy is a kind of controlled vocabulary. A taxonomy is also a kind of knowledge organization system. So, the question is: what’s the difference, if any, between a controlled vocabulary and a knowledge organization system? When I first heard of “knowledge organization system” I perceived it as merely a…
Author: Heather Hedden
Avoiding Mistakes in Taxonomy Hierarchical Relationships
Perhaps the most important issue in designing a hierarchical taxonomy is creating hierarchical relationships between terms correctly. This makes the taxonomy intuitively easy to understand and navigate by all kinds of users, regardless of whether they have had any training on using a taxonomy. The basic principles of the hierarchical…
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…
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…
Popular Topics in Taxonomies
This month marks the 5th anniversary of The Accidental Taxonomist blog, so it is a fitting time to look back and see which posts were most popular. Following are the top 10 posts with the most visits (pageviews) from the time they were published to date, with the number of…
Taxonomy Boot Camp London Conference
I was fortunate to attend and present the inaugural Taxonomy Boot Camp London conference earlier this month. After 11 successful years in the United States (initially in New York in 2005, then for four years in San Jose, CA, and six years in Washington, DC), Taxonomy Boot Camp held its…
Directories and Databases of Published Controlled Vocabularies
A source of published controlled vocabularies (taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, etc.) can be useful for different purposes. Sometimes, finding a vocabulary to license and reuse is the objective, whereas in other cases finding a vocabulary to consult as a source for confirming individual terms and relationships is the goal. Thus, different…
Synonyms, Alternate Labels, and Nonpreferred Terms
“Synonyms, Alternate Labels, and Nonpreferred Terms” is the title of my next conference presentation in October and in a different, briefer co-presented format as “How Many Synonyms Should You Have?” in November. So, now would be a good time to explore the topic in this blog. Designations “Synonyms” is…
Who Are Accidental Taxonomists?
Turning to the name of this blog, who are the accidental taxonomists? I sought an answer to this questions through some of the questions of a survey I conducted of taxonomists to gather information on the opening chapter of my book, and more recently I looked at the job titles…
Taxonomies vs. Thesauri: Practical Implementations
The differences between taxonomies and thesauri and when to implement which has been a subject of previous presentations of mine and a previous blog post, Taxonomies vs. Thesauri. Most recently, a presentation of a case study of controlled vocabularies at Cengage Learning, which I gave at the “Taxonomy Café” session…