Introduction
Content taxonomies have continually gained credibility, over the years, as the critical element in ensuring the success of content management projects. From the Greek, taxis, meaning ‘order’ and ‘arrangement,’ taxonomies use taxonomic units to classify and position in a hierarchical structure otherwise random objects. The taxonomy application to digital content generally includes software that uses auto-categorization algorithms to find, screen, and classify information.
Taxonomy is about so much more than categorizing the content. A content management strategy focuses on people, processes, and technologies that support the content throughout its lifecycle. The same focus creates a taxonomy as we design the taxonomy from the perspective of end-user material handling responsibilities within their processes and supporting technology.
Without a formal taxonomy, organizational content usually remains trapped and unusable in local databases and employee desktops, which provides little to no content context and makes it difficult to access, adapt, and, reuse.
For example, an apple is a subtype of fruit, so an apple is a fruit but not every fruit is an apple.
Organizing content in a uniform scheme across the enterprise supports the effective and efficient interoperability of corporate systems and business processes. The best practice content management strategy is a customized design and development of a business content taxonomy based on both business and technical employee requirements.
“Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.”
Thomas J. Watson
Taxonomy Definition
Taxonomy, as used in the content management environment, is defined as the science of classifying information (content and knowledge). Market intelligence supports the finding that a majority of small and medium businesses (SMBs) have not yet deployed a defined content taxonomy. However, a large percentage of these companies, use a “folksonomy” defined as metadata generated because of social tagging. Compared with the managed metadata approach, a folksonomy’s term set grows organically, rather than being predefined as in a taxonomy. In summary, taxonomies provide a logical structure for organizing enterprise information, thus making it quicker and easier to locate and use in work activities.
A taxonomy represents both the hierarchical structure into which content is authored and generally drives site and URL structures and the metadata elements and vocabularies created for meta-tagging content.
Metatags are used to identify content items for re-use across the organization, creating personalized pages for users, assisting with the search, optimizing storage, and streamlining site modifications.
Taxonomy Design Project Outline
The critical activities of a taxonomy design project include the below actions:
- Define and Document Taxonomy Project Objectives & Goals
- Identify Business Strategies and Policies Associated with Content Management
- Map and Evaluate Business and Support Processes:
Human and System-Generated Content Use Interactions and Decision-Making Points. - Identify Content Streamlining Opportunities
- Understand the Content:
Obsolete content
Correct categorization
Content organization within multiple categories
Search: number of ‘clicks.’
Flexibility and redundancy - Identify the Right Taxonomy Type: (Tree Structure, Facet, Frameworks, and Matrices, Maps)
- Identify and Quantify Benefits
- Design and Populate Taxonomy Structure
Taxonomy Value Points
The financial and non-financial benefits typically realized from a successful design and deployment of a content management taxonomy encompass:
- Organize and classify company information uniformly throughout the organization.
- Improve content search and usability.
- Support business growth.
- Improve employee productivity.
- Automatically inventory and monitor content based on a structured understanding of user and community needs.
