If winning in the content game is your goal, you must have a clear taxonomy. A taxonomy serves to supercharge your content—helping your users find and access the right content in a timely manner.

Taxonomy is the science of classification – a basic means of understanding the world around us. Creating information order and structure is what a taxonomy is all about. Classifying documents and information against the taxonomy increases the likelihood of document discoverability and creating a positive transaction.

In a world of sophisticated search engines and machine learning, it might seem like investing in a taxonomy is overkill. But sometimes even technology needs an assist.

Taxonomies exist in every industry from science to information management to healthcare. Classifications provide direction and consistency.

A controlled vocabulary is needed to ensure that the machine-assisted or fully automated indexing is comprehensive, regardless of what you are indexing. Sometimes used interchangeably, taxonomies and controlled vocabularies are controlled lists of terms used to organize information. Controlled vocabulary can be used in any industry that collects and uses information, such as academic research, libraries, corporations, governmental organizations, etc. Common types of controlled vocabularies include term lists, authority files and thesauri.

Because controlled vocabularies require the use of predefined terms, they can be challenging to adopt and apply, but using controlled vocabularies during data or metadata creation supports consistency and accuracy. There are well-established vocabularies for personal and corporate names, geographic names, topics, concepts, resource types and genres and languages.

Taxonomies provide the hierarchical categorization and classification of content into subject categories and also help to categorize and classify products and brands represented in online directories and product catalogs.

Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies to make their information findable. We classify your data within the context of your particular industry and unique data situation, so that the enriched content can be used for analysis and a deeper understanding of your knowledge base.

Data Harmony is a fully customizable suite of software products designed to maximize precise, efficient information management and retrieval. Our suite includes tools for taxonomy and thesauri construction, machine aided indexing, database management, information retrieval and explainable artificial intelligence.

Melody K. Smith

Data Harmony is an award-winning semantic suite that leverages explainable AI.

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the intelligence and the technology behind world-class explainable AI solutions.