What do legal jurisdictions and leprechauns have in common? More than one might think. In the world of classification, words like ‘extinct’ and ‘endangered’ could be applied to both and many more genres. This interesting topic came from the law magazine, Slaw, in their article, “Of Unicorns and Leprechauns: Applying the Threatened Species Taxonomy to Administrative Law.”

The depth and the variety of subjects is a perfect illustration of why organizations need a content management system that accommodates multiple descriptors/keywords/subject terms/whatever from a taxonomy or thesaurus. Developing a classification system organized into conceptually similar categories can help users gain a better understanding of the taxonomy subject area. How the content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.