Taxonomy 101

What is Taxonomy?

Taxonomy is the identification, naming and classification of organisms which originated within biology but has now become an important system for those working with metadata in the digital world.  Dublin Core define taxonomy (in digital terms), as “automated classification of documents in a hierarchy based on information gathered by a metacrawler.” ⁽¹⁾

Areas of use

In their continuing “eTaxonomy” series, Earley Associates consider areas where taxonomies (and the information science theory behind them) have been integrated into IT solutions and list these as:

Search

• Document and Records Management
• Content Management
• Digital Asset Management
• Ecommerce
• Marketing Campaign Management ⁽²⁾

Such is the importance of taxonomy that many companies offer services where taxonomy is at the core; such as Endeca. Their clients include many major household names such as Boots.com, Littlewoods and Tesco.⁽³⁾  These websites rely on their search facilities to offer the most user friendly site experience whilst providing the most relevant search results and related items to maximise sales – taxonomy is central to this.

The use of taxonomy within digital asset management is key to making the most of your assets. Earley Associates state that developing taxonomy as part of an overall digital asset management strategy enables an organisation to:

• vet the terms to be used for tagging
• build consistency of terms across business units and geography
• relate terminology used for digital assets to other business functions
• improve retrieval of assets by honing search tools ⁽⁴⁾

A digital asset is considered to be only as good as the metadata attached to it. For example, image libraries rely on images to be properly keyworded and categorised in order to be found by picture researchers. Sarah Berndt, NASA Johnson Space Center Taxonomist & DB Consulting Group, Inc., explains the importance of taxonomy is in successful digital asset management: “Taxonomy is fundamental to each stage of Digital Asset Management as it provides a centralized organizational foundation multiple schemas can map to. Ultimately, this allows content owners the ability to identify information in a way that is meaningful to them, but findable by others.” ⁽⁵⁾

Sources:

1. http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/glossary.shtml#T
2. http://digitalassetmanagementnews.org/taxonomy-metadata/modern-uses-for-taxonomies-in-the-context-of-it-solutions/
3. http://www.endeca.com/content/endeca/en/news-and-events/press-releases/2005/boots-selects-endeca-search-and-navigation-solution-to-improve-online-shopping-experience.html
4. http://www.earley.com/consulting-services/digital-asset-management/taxonomy-integration
5. http://digitalassetmanagementnews.org/taxonomy-metadata/taxonomy-and-rocket-science/
   

Related articles

• What next, taxonomy? (thetaxonomyblog.wordpress.com)
• An introduction to metadata and taxonomies (therunninglibrarian.co.uk)
  

Article image via wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_Taxonomy