There are many places where taxonomy affects our lives, the least of which is certainly not where you choose to shop, as one couple recently discovered. This interesting and humorous information came to us from CMS Wire in their article, “How To Not Fail at Taxonomy.”
You interact with taxonomy every day, whether it is locating corn tortillas at the grocery in the refrigerated section in lieu of the Latin food section or finding some pickles in the condiments aisle while others are near the cold cuts. Sometimes it is just the perspective of the store planner and sometimes there are logical classification decisions at play.
Think of taxonomy as the foundation for your search experience, whether that is across technology systems, online stores or your local hardware store.
Words like taxonomies, ontologies, controlled vocabularies and metadata schemas can cause anxiety, but they are not as complicated as they sound. Taxonomy refers to the infrastructure that supports information retrieval and access. This infrastructure solves real world problems like where, how and why.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
