What is a Taxonomy

In this post I’d like to provide the quick overview of what is the Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a categorization framework agreed upon by business and content owners (with the help of subject matter experts)that will be used to tag content.

As an Information Architect building the taxonomy is an important activity of your role. Taxonomy affects the information enterprise-wide in the following areas: Navigation, Content Management, Search, Tagging. Taxonomy can be represented by following types: flat, hierarchical, faced, network, functional, subject-oriented

When you create your Taxonomy project plan consider the following steps:

  • quality metrics
  • content analysis 
  • metadata specification
  • vocabulary development (+ thesaurus)
  • semantic network
  • cost benefit analysis model

Recommendation:

– About 10 discrete divisions (called facets)
– 4-6 levels deep.
– Up to 15 terms at each level.

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