Editorial
Taxonomies are an important component of knowledge management or content management strategies. They make desired information or content easier for employees to find, by allowing users to search or browse for taxonomy concepts that are properly tagged rather than relying on less accurate and less comprehensive keyword-in-text searches.
Although creating a new taxonomy from scratch can be a challenge, your organization likely has taxonomies in different systems already. The question is whether these taxonomies are effective at serving their purpose and if they can also be adapted to additional purposes.
Where Are Taxonomies in Your Organization?
Most organizations have some terms lists in use, such as for document types, product categories, product/service names, departments, geographic locations, job roles, markets/industries and so on, which are managed as metadata. Whether these count as “taxonomies” or just term lists depends on whether there is any additional structure. This could be a simple two-to-three level hierarchy arrangement of the terms, the addition of high-level grouping categories or the implementation of multiple term lists to help users filter and refine search results. Then, the set of term lists is considered a “faceted taxonomy.”
Content management systems of various types, digital asset management systems, product information management systems, customer relationship management systems, collaboration and intranet tools, etc., all support metadata with controlled term lists and often hierarchical or faceted taxonomies. If you have any of these systems, you likely already have a taxonomy of some sort in use.
Whoever installed and configured the system may have added some taxonomy to get it started or to test its functionality, but the taxonomy was not designed with user input or thorough analysis of the content to be tagged. This may result in the taxonomy being ignored or under-used in tagging content.
Let’s consider an inverse scenario: at some point in the past, your company hired a consultant to research and develop a suitable taxonomy, but for some reason it was never fully implemented. Or, perhaps the taxonomy was implemented in only a test/development instance of the software and not in production. In this case, it may be time to reevaluate such unused or under-used taxonomies.
Related Article: How Your Taxonomy Can Support Your Knowledge Management
Finally, many organizations have other kinds of vocabularies, such as terminologies or glossaries. These, however, are not intended or tagging and retrieving content, but rather for defining terms and ensuring consistent use. You should not use glossaries or terminologies as information/content management taxonomies, although they are a useful reference source when building or editing taxonomies.
Evaluating Your Taxonomy’s Quality
If you have a taxonomy, whether currently implemented or not, how do you determine if it is good and appropriate enough? Both general quality and context suitability need to be considered when evaluating a taxonomy.
In terms of quality, the taxonomy should be reviewed against certain criteria regardless of its implementation. Thus, this kind of review and evaluation can be done on a taxonomy that is not currently in use. Taxonomy quality criteria include the following:
- Terms are unambiguous in their meaning; when two terms with very similar meanings occur, such as “Contracts” and “Agreements,” consider merging them.
- Concepts have alternative labels (synonyms), which are sufficient but not too many so as not to match text with a different meaning or confuse users when displayed. Taxonomies that are large enough to have alternative labels should have at least as many alternative labels as preferred labels.
- The meaning of each term (concept label) is clear and understood out of the context of the hierarchy, not ambiguous such as a term called “Application.”
- Concept labels are nouns or noun phrases. Adjectives, such as “Technical,” are suitable only as attributes but not for concepts within a hierarchical taxonomy.
- Countable nouns are in the plural, such as “Databases” instead of “Database.”
- Hierarchical relationships are valid, whereby all of a narrower concept is included in its broader concept (Check for this using the phrase "is a..."). Exceptions should be limited to grouping categories at the top concept level, such as “Climate change mitigation” narrowed down to “Climate change.”
- The hierarchy should be intuitive and clear and not have miscellaneous categories, such as "Related technology domains" or "Other types.”
- Hierarchical logic should continue for all levels of the hierarchy, so that even the narrowest term "is a" kind of the broadest term in its hierarchical tree.
If you are using dedicated taxonomy/thesaurus management software, you can use its quality management feature to easily check for issues such as duplicate terms or labels, the total number of alternative labels, the total hierarchical depth, orphan terms (which lack broader terms but which are not intended to be broad top concepts) and concepts which are missing certain relationships or alternative labels.
Evaluating Your Taxonomy’s Effectiveness
Even a well-designed taxonomy might be ineffective if it is not well suited for its content and/or use cases. Although a taxonomy could have initially been well-designed, changes in content, user interface, or perhaps even the users may have made the taxonomy less effective over time. Perhaps the taxonomy was originally designed for a slightly different purpose than its current use, or maybe user research or content analysis was lacking or insufficient in the first place.
Related Article: Is It Time to Automate Your Workforce Skills Taxonomy?
Testing is necessary to check a taxonomy’s suitability for its context. Since a taxonomy is used both to tag content and to support search/browsing for information, ideally both the suitability of the taxonomy for tagging the content and the suitability of the taxonomy for retrieving the content are tested. Although it is easier to test a taxonomy’s effectiveness once it has been implemented, it is possible to test it offline.
To test a taxonomy for tagging, ask representative users of the taxonomy to propose sample documents to tag and then have them browse or search the taxonomy to see if they can find the desired terms. The test-taggers should note any difficulties in finding the expected or suitable terms and any uncertainties regarding possible terms for tagging.
To test the taxonomy for finding content, sample searches should be executed based on use cases that come out of questionnaires or interviews of sample users. To do this testing, you should first identify known content, as indicated from the use cases, and then have test users who are searching for content attempt to find the content with the taxonomy to determine if taxonomy is adequate. Expected content which was not retrieved should then be analyzed to determine whether suitable terms about it existed in the taxonomy. If not, the terms should be added.
Conference
Oct
20
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Keeping Your Taxonomies Updated
Fortunately, taxonomies are flexible and adaptable for easy revision; new terms can be added, ambiguously similar terms with overlapping meaning can be merged, additional relationships between terms can be created to help navigating the taxonomy,and definitions and notes can be added to clarify the meaning and usage of terms. An important part of revising a taxonomy is to document how continuous maintenance revisions should be done, which will contribute to a reliable and effective governance plan.
With sufficient evaluation and editing, a legacy taxonomy can be given a new life with an effective role — and could even be adapted for a new purpose.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
