What Is Taxonomy and Why Is It Useful?

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Walter Haynes
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1 What Is Taxonomy and Why Is It Useful? Theresa Putkey Information Architect & Taxonomist Key Pointe Usability Consulting,

2 What Is Taxonomy? Many libraries organize their books by the Dewey Decimal System. When you walk into a library, you might see thousands of books. If it weren t for the Dewey Decimal System, you wouldn t know which books are where. Dewey let s you find books based on things like author and subject, without having to look at every single book.

3 What Is Taxonomy? Using a taxonomy in a corporate, government, or organizational environment has the same effect. A taxonomy is a list of terms you use to categorize and find your information again, without having to look through every file, image, document, or web page.

4 Examples of Taxonomy It s easiest to understand taxonomy by looking at a few examples. Here are some projects Key Pointe has worked on in the past.

5 A not-for-profit had a lot of files related to their product offerings. The files were a mess across several network drives and personal hard drives. Example 1 They needed to implement a digital asset management (DAM) system to keep track of the files and they needed a taxonomy to help them categorize and find these files. While they did use a file structure, not everyone understood the file naming or structure and they needed a different way to find files.

6 Example 2 A technology company was re-doing their Support website and needed to categorize their information by subject. They had different products, services, and topics and wanted to allow users to access these topics in different ways. They also wanted to use taxonomy to dynamically display content on pages, so they didn t have to hand code every link.

7 Example 3 An investment company was re-doing their intranet site. Content was created by different teams about the same topic. They wanted to make sure the intranet users could find all content about the same topic, regardless of which team created it or where it was saved on the intranet. They also wanted to improve their search results page to allow users to filter their search results by taxonomy.

8 Why Is Taxonomy Helpful? Based on the examples, we can create some themes for how taxonomy helps us on the web.

9 Information Overload We have software products that are extremely information heavy Managed with wcms, ecms, ccms, DAM, PIM, MAM How do we keep track of all the things in those systems? Not everyone understands the logic behind a file system Taxonomy gives us another avenue to categorize and find information

10 It s Helpful to Content Authors Categorize information to find it again Can re-use content or link to it more easily Dynamically display information on a website instead of building pages by hand Controlling terminology so authors are using consistent wording

11 It s Helpful to Users Find information outside of a traditional folder structure Find via familiar terminology Increases accuracy of search results Allows the search results to be filtered by taxonomy

12 Taxonomy In Action Here are some examples of taxonomy in action, to help you visualize how taxonomy is helpful on the web.

13 Users Can Browse Information by Different Categories

14 Users Can Filter by Different Categories to Narrow or Broaden Results

15 Users Can Find an Item Despite Idiosyncratic Naming I.e. Aubergine=Purple!

16 Users Can Find an Item Despite Different (but correct!) Naming I.e. Mark Twain is the same as Samuel Clemens

17 Summary Taxonomy is a categorization technique which allows us to find information without having to remember exactly where it s stored. It helps us with finding content, re-using content, dynamically creating web pages, filtering search results, and improving the search results displayed.

18 Learn More Use Information Architecture and Taxonomy to Improve SEO The Accidental Taxonomist by Heather Hedden Making the Case: Explaining Taxonomy to Business People Everything you ever wanted to know about taxonomies from NISO

19 About Key Pointe Usability Consulting Through User Research, Information Architecture, and Taxonomy, Key Pointe Usability Consulting researches usability problems, develops website structures, and creates designs that balance user expectations with business needs. Key Pointe s process results in intuitive content and effective internal and external search strategies for user-friendly customer experiences.

20 Contact Info Theresa Putkey Information Architect & Taxonomist ca.linkedin.com/in/tputkey

Taxonomies and controlled vocabularies best practices for metadata

Original Article Taxonomies and controlled vocabularies best practices for metadata Heather Hedden is the taxonomy manager at First Wind Energy LLC. Previously, she was a taxonomy consultant with Earley