Last year I had the opportunity to create some taxonomy in the SharePoint Term Store (also called Managed Metadata), and while I am pleased that hierarchical taxonomies are supported in this widely used platform, I had some concerns about the support of polyhierarchy, as information about this capability is inconsistent.…
Category: Hierarchical taxonomy
Taxonomies and Tables of Contents
A table of contents and a hierarchical taxonomy appear to be quite similar. In my last blog post I looked at taxonomies and indexes, and in the end concluded: “A taxonomy serves a purpose that is both, or something in-between, that of a table of contents and a back-of-the-book index.…
Trends in Hierarchical Taxonomy Displays
Taxonomies connect users to content. So, how a taxonomy is displayed to users is very important in its effectiveness. This is a topic about which I gave a conference presentation back in 2011 and will present again next week. As I update my previous presentation, looking at some of the…
One or More Taxonomies
In the various definitions of taxonomy, one aspect of the definition that is often missing is what constitutes a single taxonomy (or thesaurus) versus multiple related taxonomies (or thesauri). If you hire a taxonomy consultant, they won’t tell you because they will defer to their client’s terminology. If you are…
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…
Taxonomies vs. Classification
A question had come up in one of my classes on how classification differs from taxonomies/thesauri. As part of an assignment to find thesauri on the web a student sought to find “how the Federal Government classifies its publications and was expecting to find a very elaborate Thesaurus … and…
From Folders to Facets
A recent taxonomy project I completed involved creating a new taxonomy for a financial services client who was migrating its internal content from shared drive folders to a SharePoint-based intranet, which also included automated indexing and a search engine (FAST). The new taxonomy will help support the search functionality, and…