Welcome To The Taxonomy Guide

Overview

In today's highly competitive marketplace, enterprises are urgently seeking better ways to organize and derive value from their knowledge assets. The organization of content has moved from the fringes of enterprise activity to a position on centre stage. Taxonomies have become one of the key ways to provide employees, customers and suppliers with well ordered content placed in a context that serves the goals of the enterprise.

These are exciting and challenging times for those entrusted with implementing an intranet or enterprise taxonomy. Taxonomies represent a new feature in the information landscape with a support technology that constantly changes and evolves in dramatic ways. This technology brings with it the need to adapt traditional techniques for organizing information to those required in the digital realm.

The Taxonomy Guide is a response to the need for a dynamic resource that provides information professionals with an entry into the world of taxonomies and a context for planning and moving forward into a taxonomy implementation.

Whatever role you play in managing your organization's knowledge assets – as a business unit head, a librarian, a knowledge manager, a systems designer, an information architect, or a Chief Information Officer (CIO) - our intent is to make it easier for you to learn about and keep current with enterprise taxonomies. It's our plan to lay out the issues, the steps and phases along the way and point you in the direction of supporting resources.

Use this resource as a guide to consult as you move through the complexities of planning for and implementing a taxonomy project for your enterprise. As we find new information, new technologies, new case studies we will add them to The Guide. As you gain experience and insight into the taxonomy process, we hope you will share these with your colleagues through this resource.

What You Will Find Here

The literature on taxonomies reflects the newness and evolutionary state of the field. Information is highly dispersed and anecdotal. It's difficult to get a feel for what the overall process of implementing a taxonomy looks like from beginning to end. No systematic body of procedures and techniques has as yet taken hold. The Guide works to overcome or minimize these difficulties.

We have synthesized the dispersed literature of the field and the first hand experience of those who have built taxonomies to create an online resource that will change and grow as the field grows.

Five Modules

Content is presented within a framework composed of five high-level topical categories or modules:

1 In Context

• Find out what is meant by a taxonomy.
• What is its purpose, its benefits?
• Where does it fit into the knowledge asset management cycle?
• What other applications make use of taxonomies?

2 Basics

• Become familiar with the process and tools for classification and appreciate why classification is the heart of taxonomy design.
• Learn about the role of the traditional information techniques of vocabulary control and thesauri in taxonomies.
• Find out how these traditional techniques intersect with metadata schemas.

3 Tools

• Learn about the features, functions, and limitations of automatic categorization software tools. See where and how the tools fit into the taxonomy building process.
• Explore use, features and functions of thesaurus management software.
• Check out the new software tools that are revolutionizing the categorization, indexing and representation of content on intranets.

4 Design

• Find out the preparatory steps needed to identify the domain and purpose of the taxonomy.
• Discover the factors that enter into the design of a taxonomy surrounding identifying terms, choosing a structure, and testing for usability.
• Consider complicating factors such as multiple taxonomies, multiple perspectives (facets), and user tagging.

5 Planning

• Begin the planning process by making a business case.
• Set up a project management team and consider the key strategic decisions.
• Learn from the case studies of others who have undertaken a taxonomy project.

About the Exercises and Examples

Intranets are by their nature private. Therefore, the examples of taxonomies in The Guide are taken from public web sites. As we collect more case studies, we'll add mockups of taxonomies that have been developed for organizations.

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