Over the 26 years that I have been involved in controlled vocabularies, thesauri, and taxonomies, the biggest change I have seen in the field is the adoption of SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) as a schema model and standard. If you are creating taxonomies exclusively within a single system (such…
Taxonomists and others whose work involves taxonomies have not been a unified professional community. Taxonomy development work is interdisciplinary, spanning different specializations, and different organizational functions, including the following: Information services taxonomies and thesauri, developed by those with a background in library/information science, thesauri, and cataloging, and possibly indexing Product/ecommerce…
A defining characteristic of taxonomies is that terms/concepts are arranged in broader-narrower hierarchies, which may resemble tree structures. A limited number of top concepts each have narrower concepts, which in turn may have narrower concepts, etc., and the narrowest concepts at the bottom of the hierarchy are sometimes referred to…
Taxonomies are very valuable, but not always easy to define, and they are described in various ways. They are also interdisciplinary, as taxonomies are developed by people in different fields for slightly different, yet similar purposes. I have heard various comments about taxonomies over the decades. In the earlier years…
In planning a taxonomy, I have often said that it is important to define the taxonomy’s scope, specifically the subject area scope of the taxonomy’s terms, but without going into more detail. Recently I was asked by a client how to define a taxonomy’s scope. This is a good question.…
In keeping with the title of this blog, it’s time to check in again to learn more about who taxonomists are and what they are doing. I conducted a survey of taxonomists (promoted through discussion lists, groups, and social media) in 2009 to gather information for my book, The Accidental…
I have long felt that there is some uncertainty as to where named entities (names of specific people, places, organizations, products, etc.) fit into taxonomies. Standards suggest one way, and practice tends to follow different way in dealing with these proper nouns. As taxonomy trends evolve so does the position…
When I had done consulting for ecommerce taxonomy clients years ago, and they would refer to the taxonomy facets for products as “attributes,” I felt that might be confusing, because I considered “attributes” something else: a characteristic like metadata of a taxonomy term or a feature of an ontology. I…
Coming from an editorial content background, I have always valued taxonomies for making content findable, but more recently I have come to appreciate how taxonomies can also play a role in making data accessible and useful. Taxonomies have successfully aided people in finding and retrieving desired content since the 1990s…
I was recently asked if a website’s sitemap of company’s website could serve as the start of a taxonomy for an organization. The sitemap, after all, includes all the relevant topics pertaining to an organization’s business offerings, and they are arranged in a hierarchy. I have previously blogged on the…
