A Taxonomy Primer. Taxonomies…thesauri…classification systems…synonym rings.
We’ve heard all of these terms in the context of the Web. As Web sites expand, the task of organizing them has become increasingly problematic and complex. All of the terms mentioned above are controlled vocabularies. That means that they are organized lists of words and phrases, or notation systems, that are used to initially tag content, and then to find it through navigation or search. Unfortunately, a great deal of disagreement exists as to the individual definitions of each of the terms I mentioned; we spend too much of our valuable time misunderstanding each other. UnderstandingMetadata.pdf (application/pdf Object) Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!
Making sense of it all Abstract To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections.
Controlled vocabularies.