Taxonomies and thesauri are only truly useful if their terms are appropriately indexed or tagged to content. My path to taxonomist had been as an indexer, so I always value the importance of human indexers. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge that automated indexing, also called auto-categorization, is becoming increasingly common and…
The Accidental Taxonomist Blog
Taxonomies for Specific Business Needs
Designing controlled vocabularies to meet specific business needs was the topic of my latest conference presentation at Taxonomy Boot Camp London on October 17. There are two aspects to this topic: (1) the type of controlled vocabulary to choose, and (2) whether to have the same controlled vocabulary or distinct…
Vocabulary Management Issues
“Issues in Vocabulary Management” is the latest Technical Report (TR-06-2017) published by the National InformationStandards Organization (NISO), approved on September 25, 2017. I had the honor of serving on its working group, specifically on its subgroup for Vocabulary Use/Reuse. The most significant NISO publication for controlled vocabularies is ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005…
Taxonomies in SharePoint
Controlled vocabulary metadata, including hierarchical taxonomies, has been supported in SharePoint since its 2010 version, and its use and features have been enhanced is succeeding versions of SharePoint. While it’s not technically difficult for users to create taxonomies and apply their terms to content items in SharePoint, developing a metadata/taxonomy…
Metadata and Taxonomies
Metadata and taxonomies are related. In The Accidental Taxonomist, 2nd edition (pp. 15-18), I explain that most, but not all, taxonomies (not purely navigational taxonomies) serve to populate terms/values in metadata fields/elements; and some, but definitely not all, metadata fields are populated by terms/values from controlled vocabularies or, more specifically,…
Standards for Taxonomies
Since “taxonomies” are rather loosely defined, standards specifically for taxonomies do not exist, but there are standards that are relevant to taxonomies. A taxonomy is a kind of controlled vocabulary, and there are standards for controlled vocabularies. There are also standards specifically for thesauri, a kind of controlled vocabulary with…
Adjective and Verb Terms in Taxonomies
Terms in a taxonomy are generally nouns or noun phrases, but this does not mean that a taxonomy cannot comprise adjectives or verbs instead. There may be differences of opinion on this, though. A thesaurus, another kind of controlled vocabulary, by contrast, is expected to follow standards (ANSI/NISO Z.39.19 or…
Taxonomy Term Specificity
One of the challenges in creating or editing taxonomies is determining how specific the terms should be. This is a key issue in making a taxonomy customized for a certain implementation, which involves a unique set of content to be tagged/indexed and a certain set of users. Highly specific terms tend…
Taxonomies as Knowledge Organization Systems
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…
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…