Creating Order out of Chaos with Taxonomies.

The article examines the capabilities of taxonomy, a structured often hierarchical classification system of topics or subject categories. Pre-built taxonomies covering common business functions, including legal, information technology, human resources and sales and marketing are available from search-technology and ECM companies. There are also worthwhile pre-built taxonomies in the public domain. The Taxonomy Warehouse provides a free directory of 501 taxonomies, thesauri, classification schemes and other authority files from around the world, plus information about taxonomy references, resources and events. Pre-built taxonomies can speed up the taxonomy creation process, enabling organizations to deliver immediate results while still allowing taxonomies to be fine-tuned for organization-specific requirements. A significant disadvantage of pre-built taxonomies is that because they are not specific to an organization and its objectives, they have limited applicability. And using pre-built taxonomies will introduce unfamiliar terminology and make user training more time-consuming. The primary disadvantage of building a taxonomy is the time it takes. It is much faster to use a pre-existing taxonomy or even to customize a pre-existing one that is compatible in scope and application. And another disadvantage to building a taxonomy is that it is usually more expensive than buying a pre-existing one. INSET: A Little History....