Indexing & Taxonomies: Finding the Best Way to Organize Online Content

How should we categorize content for electronic management, storage, findability, and delivery? In the popular vernacular of our information architecture, we often talk about indexing content on one hand and then developing a taxonomy of terms on the other. At first glance, the differences between these two activities seem academic -- more of interest to research librarians and knowledge management gurus than to front-line business analysts and systems designers. After all, both indexing and taxonomies involve the use of language. We're simply developing sets of words and phrases, and then associating them with paragraphs, pages, drawings, documents, photographs, and other types of content objects.