A very quick introduction to taxonomies for people working in content-related disciplines
What the heck is taxonomy? The science of making taxes? The booming, trending but still underground marketplace of investing in and trading taxidermic objects? Well: none of the above!
As all the -nomies, it is the science (Greek: nomos: law or science) of something, in this case of order or arrangement (Greek: taxis). So this is not about law AND order, but about the laws OF order.
Taxonomy is the science of order and arrangement and the discipline of categorization and classification and can be practiced in every field where the (hierarchical) structuring of information is needed.
A taxonomy is a list of terms that describes and classifies all assets in a domain and also represents their hierarchical structure. It is used to structure and organize concepts.
Types of taxonomies
There are different types of taxonomies, that differ in complexity:
A controlled vocabulary is the simplest one. A list of terms that normalizes descriptive terms might be a good example: There are variant terms of a country’s name, like different abbreviations or country codes, and there is a preferred term, that is used to harmonize all of the variants.
A synonym ring goes further into this direction by providing a connected set of words that are all equivalent and yield the same result when searched for.
A simple taxonomy puts terms into a hierarchical structure. Parent, child and sibling terms map out the hierarchical relationships of the terms.
Thesauri display related terms and concepts to the searchers and guide them to the one they were looking for by presenting all of the connected terms and concepts.
Faceted classifications are less hierarchical than other taxonomies, but are more flexible. They are sets of attributes with controlled vocabularies and semantic relationships and are often used in webshops or other e-commerce-sites, as they allow the combination of terms to narrow searches.
Ontologies are the most complex form of taxonomies. By using semantics to describe the relationships between the data assets, they are able to link and relate large and different sets of data.
The use of taxonomies
Taxonomies are used to:
· Define the terms that inhabit metadata
· Harmonize different expressions and dialects
· Link related concepts to each other
