With the growth of electronic information, taxonomies are increasingly used for organizing information and content in document and asset management systems, across enterprises, and on Websites. Are these taxonomies different from literature retrieval thesauri? How does one go about creating a taxonomy? This class will provide recommended best practices for how to create terms, relationships, and variants for different kinds of taxonomies or controlled vocabularies, and will also introduce different software tools for doing so. Topics also include taxonomy and thesaurus displays, faceted taxonomies, sources for terms, and project approaches. Whether you need to create a taxonomy to organize information on a Website, classify information in a content management system, establish a controlled vocabulary for a periodical or database indexing project, or simply understand how to use them better, this class will help prepare you for that task.
Program Takeaways
- Building taxonomies is a complex task that requires multiple skills, and is creative, analytical, user-focused, and collaborative.
- Different kinds of taxonomies and controlled vocabularies are suitable for different situations of different users, systems, and content.
- It's important to consider the needs of the end-users, the indexing methods, the display constraints, and the quantity and type of content when designing a taxonomy.
