Taxonomy: Why it's Important

Taxonomy helps provide structure to information.

A lot of times when we're looking for information on a website, you can either browse or you can search. You can either try to find something by navigating, or you can put in a search term to pull back some results. When we typically know what we want, we'll try to search; we'll just retrieve that information. When we don’t know what we want, we'll spend some time trying to browse.

A taxonomy can actually help improve both search and browse, because if we design a taxonomy in an effective way, it helps us with knowledge discovery.

In other words, if we are going into, say, a bookstore or a library and we're browsing the shelves, we can look around and find information, find knowledge serendipitously. I'll say, "Oh, this is very interesting. I didn't know this was here."

The same thing can happen with a well-designed taxonomy. It tells the user something about the knowledge that's contained in the site. So, if I browse I'll discover something.

The other thing that can happen with taxonomy is we can use it to improve recall. If I'm searching for something and I put a term into the search box, I can get results back that are actually put into the context of a taxonomy. We can cluster those results.

I like to say that search is a conversation. If you ask me a question and I don't understand it or I want clarification, I ask you a question back. And then you can answer that question.

We can do the same thing with search and we can do the same thing using taxonomies because if somebody puts in the term "deliverable" I can bring them to a place in the website that has deliverables. And then I can have the different types of deliverables, I can have them for different industries. I can have them for different project types, or I can have them for different phases. All of those different ways of classifying the content come from the taxonomy.

So I have the ability to engage in that conversation with the user; that's a mechanism of disambiguation.

The taxonomy is a set of organizing principles that can be applied to a website, and it can help us navigate to the content. It can help us discover content. It can help us very precisely return search results on content.

There's another piece of this which is called faceted search, and this is something you're also seeing a lot of on websites, on ecommerce sites. I have the ability to very precisely pull back information about size and style and color and price and all of these different things.

You can think of the same thing with knowledge assets. You can pull back particular types of deliverables. You can pull back things for specific industries, you can pull back things for specific types of projects, sized projects, and so on.

We can very, very precisely describe the knowledge assets that we have on a site, internally in the organization, products on the website. Any bit of information can be described in these ways, and any type of search and navigation will be improved by using a taxonomy applied correctly.