Taxonomy

Before you start: why should you create a taxonomy?

Let’s be blunt: is a taxonomy necessary for your project? Why put extra work and effort into creating a system that many organizations seem to eschew? Let me illustrate with a quote from the kmworld Knowledge workers spend 15 to 35 percent of their time searching for information 40 percent cannot find the information they need on their corporate intranets 15 percent of their time is spent duplicating information that exists but cannot be found If the usability of a system can be improved, the time and effort that has been invested will result in time saved by everyone searching for information.

So…what is a taxonomy?

The first taxonomy has been created by a Swede, Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century, attempting to order nature in a hierarchical system. Many changes have been introduced since then, however, that system is still in use. You might recall that three kingdoms (originally they were animals, plants, and minerals) are divided into classes and smaller subgroups. This hierarchical (or parent-child) relationship is what distinguishes a taxonomy from classification, which is not necessarily ordered hierarchically.

LATCH onto anything: how to organize anything

As systems grow more and more complex, we need better ways to organize them. The Dewey Decimal System is one of the classifications used to categorize the books in the library by subject matter. With the amount of information and data growing exponentially, so does the need for the organization of it. You could argue that what the librarians were already doing for hundreds of years can be described as Information Architecture, yet the term first emerged in the 1970s, coined by Richard Saul Wurman. Trained as an architect, R.S. Wurman worked as a graphic designer, specializing in information design. He describes how he organized telephone books, road atlases, and airline guides in new ways to make them more user-friendly in Information Anxiety (1989, issued again in 2000 as Information Anxiety2). Anything can be organized either through:

• Location,
• Alphabetical order,
• Category,
• Time,
• Hierarchical order.

Mental Models

When organizing content according to these criteria, it is important to consider the importance of mental models. Asking and testing users can help us clarify which concepts are misleading. Categories and tags are often mixed up. Some systems use one or the other, but some use both. How do you go about it then?

Categories or tags?

You can think of categories as a table of contents. Categories are pre-planned, controlled, and often hierarchical. They are mutually exclusive and limited in number. Tags, on the other hand, are more like an index, less controlled, often unstructured, and may be added on the go. Tags are not mutually exclusive and can be more specific. WordPress which currently powers the largest chunk of the net uses both. Categories might change over time but the implementation at the beginning of a project will prevent future conflicts, inconsistencies, and findability issues. Both categories and tags can be metadata.

Standards for developing categories

ANSI/NISO standard Z.39.19 provides guidelines on the selection, formulation, organization, and display of terms that together make up a controlled vocabulary. Its primary aim is to provide a consistent user experience through vocabulary control. A newer standard, developed by the W3 consortium: Simple Knowledge Organization System SKOS is part of the Semantic Web family of standards.

Taxonomies features: Synonym control

As we have seen so far, vocabulary control is a crucial feature when creating a taxonomy. Synonyms need to be identified, and the choice of a particular term might be dictated by the desire to appeal to a particular audience. When browsing available courses on masterclass.com, ‘culinary arts’ attracted my attention. It’s not difficult to guess why a premium education provider such as MasterClass prefers the label of ‘culinary arts’ to simple ‘cooking’, ‘cookery’, ‘gastronomy’, or even ‘cuisine’. It is essential though to decide which term will be used and use it consistently.

Structure: facets

For an effective query, we need to be able to limit the search. This is also sometimes called a refinement, filter, or narrow by. Faceted classification is excellent for both new and seasoned users but might become unwieldy when it comes to extremely large taxonomies.

Taxonomy creation

When creating a taxonomy planning is crucial. You’ll need to determine who will be involved, the scope of the project, the type of taxonomy, as well as the limitations of your system. Another consideration is maintenance. Folksonomy is a term given to a classification where users have more control, so no maintenance by a designated person is required but the system is more chaotic. If there is a chance of interacting with or testing users, so much the better. Analyzing your users, their aims, and specific use cases will give you a clearer picture of their needs.

Sources for concepts, labels, and variants

Your users are also an excellent source from which you can mine labels and categories. Your main source is your content -

• table of contents,
• metadata,
• headings,
• glossaries,
• file folder names,
• navigation,
• menu labels.

Sources such as suggestions from SMEs and engineers might be too detailed and should be considered with caution. The same goes for the external taxonomies which might vary too much from your project.

• taxonomy
• categories
• tags