Taxonomies are important and provide a valuable foundation for any enterprise search strategy. This interesting topic came to us from CMS Wire in their article, “Naming of Parts: What Taxonomies Bring to Enterprise Search.”
A taxonomy is a hierarchical array of related terms which can be used to widen or narrow a query term. What this means is findability can be achieved faster and more comprehensively with a strong taxonomy.
Knowledge graphs and other semantic technologies are also being used to create what might be regarded as taxonomy-like systems. The danger here is the more distant the relationship, the more likely the linking logic has made a non-logical jump.
Taxonomy management software is becoming more powerful as it gains the ability to represent the complex, specific relationships of a thesaurus or ontology.
Remember, a taxonomy is really nothing more than a filing system, a comprehensive filing system. For these types of projects, 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.
