3 - Taxonomy Structuring and Scaling: A Standardised Approach

Summary

Editor's note: Jonathan has a gift for explaining the complex world of taxonomy development and for making it relevant to the goals of the organisation. His chapter is a detailed case study that will be useful no matter what type of information you are working with. It will make the sometimes daunting question of ‘how do we expand this taxonomy to do more?’ feel answerable.

Introduction

An author needs to establish credibility, so here goes: I’ve been a consultant Information Architect for 18 years, extending a longer career in journalism and digital publishing. In more than 30 projects to build and implement content classification and information management systems, I’ve worked for UK government agencies, global blue-chip companies and influential charities. My projects have covered financial services, law, health care, social services, international development, media, IT, telecoms and consumer products.

In this chapter, I present a case study that incorporates a range of proven techniques and demonstrates how a controlled vocabulary answers many information management challenges. You’ll learn how to:

• • set goals focused on user benefits, not IT demands

• • instigate an information audit – identify what content descriptions are available, what's needed and your key stakeholders

• • understand the main structural elements of a controlled vocabulary and how best to use them

• • build a multi-faceted taxonomy, comprising entities, subject areas and content types

• • extend that taxonomy with synonyms, related topics and contextual Keywords

• • explore multiple uses of your taxonomy, from building better web navigation to improving search, and from increasing publication efficiency to managing a document's lifecycle

• • leverage your taxonomy to improve content classification and drive automatic classification with rule-based and machine-learning solutions.

Background to the case study

This chapter describes the content management challenges faced by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) and the solutions it employed. Although its area of knowledge was specialised and its needs specific, I introduced a standardised approach to taxonomy building to improve content classification, navigation and search.

While that approach, described below, featured many best-practice techniques, the success of the project owed much to top-level management support, plus the expertise of the group's library and information staff, represented on the project by the invaluable Alice Laird.