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…
The Accidental Taxonomist Blog
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…
Capitalization in Taxonomies
The question often comes up: what is the preferred style for the capitalization of taxonomy terms? Other than all proper nouns being capitalized, there is no strict rule for generic terms. In making the determination, it’s important to address the following questions. What kind of taxonomy is it? How will…
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…
Testing Taxonomies
As mentioned in my previous blogpost, “Evaluating Taxonomies,” taxonomy evaluation and taxonomy testing differ. While the evaluation of a taxonomy by a taxonomist is needed when a taxonomy is created by non-taxonomists (such as by subject-matter experts instead), testing of a taxonomy, on the other hand, is recommended in all…
Evaluating Taxonomies
In my last blog post, “Taxonomy Management Consulting,” I mentioned that more organizations now have taxonomies, so the need is shifting somewhat from designing and building new taxonomies to managing existing taxonomies. It might not be that simple, however, if the existing taxonomy was created and never used, created for…
Taxonomy Management Consulting
I recently wrote an article on taxonomy management for the online magazine FreePint. By “taxonomy management” I mean taxonomy maintenance, governance, and long-term planning. I’m not going to repeat that article here, because you can look it up. The short version is available without a subscription: “The Care and Feeding…
The Remote Taxonomist
One of the characteristics of taxonomy work is that taxonomists can work remotely from their managers, colleagues, or clients, and many do. It’s not because those attracted to taxonomy work specifically want to work from home. Rather, taxonomy work is a narrow specialty, in which relatively few people are sufficiently…
Taxonomies and Content Management
Taxonomies are relevant to various applications, implementations, software products, disciplines, and industries, whereas taxonomy itself is not really a discipline or industry. This is apparent in how taxonomy shows up as a topic in presentation session in many different conferences. These include conferences and fields of: knowledge management, enterprise search,…