Just the word taxonomy can confuse people, let alone the application. First they ask, “oh is that where you preserve dead animals?” Then they think it has something to do with the IRS. When you finally get them to understand it is a classification system, they have flashbacks to high school biology class. Taxonomy unfortunately has that effect on many, and that is sad. It is just bringing order to a group of items and identifying relationships. It’s not rocket science.
We found this interesting information on Beye Network in their article, “Seven Things Every Government Agency Should Know about Taxonomies and Business Intelligence.” Taxonomies enable an organization to successfully search for specific objects because of the order established. Finding things is why taxonomies exist to begin with. Creating a business taxonomy is no different, and this is a good article to help those working on such projects.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
