Standards for Taxonomies

Since “taxonomies” are rather loosely defined, standards specifically for taxonomies do not exist, but there are standards that are relevan...

Adjective and Verb Terms in Taxonomies

Terms in a taxonomy are generally nouns or noun phrases, but this does not mean that a taxonomy cannot comprise adjectives or verbs instead....

Avoiding Mistakes in Taxonomy Hierarchical Relationships

Perhaps the most important issue in designing a hierarchical taxonomy is creating hierarchical relationships between terms correctly. This m...

"The Accidental Taxonomist," 2nd edition

Recently I was asked what I added to the newly published 2nd edition of my book, The Accidental Taxonomist . The additions and changes are s...

Vocabularies and Controlled Vocabularies

I have long considered a taxonomy as a particular, structured kind of controlled vocabulary. More recently, however, I have been hearing of ...

Taxonomies and Terminologies

The current specialties of taxonomy management and terminology management have different histories and serve different purposes, but they ar...

Deviating from Taxonomy Standards

In my last blog post, I suggested that enterprise taxonomies need not follow the standards for controlled vocabularies and thesuari (ANSI/NI...

Enterprise Taxonomies vs. Traditional Taxonomies

A book that I have been reading ( Structures for Organizing Knowledge: Exploring Taxonomies, Ontologies, and Other Schemas , by June Abbas, ...