Understanding polyhierarchy within taxonomies can be a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. This interesting information came from Heather Hedden’s blog, The Accidental Taxonomist, in the post titled, “Polyhierarchy in the SharePoint Term Store.”
Polyhierarchy means a taxonomy term has more than one broader term or parent term. In a traditional hierarchical taxonomy structure, a term has one broader term (unless it is the top term, in which case it has no broader term) and multiple narrower terms.
That seems clear as….mud? It may appear to the user that the term is duplicated in different locations in the taxonomy, but this duplication is in appearances only, because it is the same term.
Hedden does a great job of digging into this topic and helping even the newest of newbies get a good grasp of the subject.
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.
