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....

Taxonomy Term Specificity

One of the challenges in creating or editing taxonomies is determining how specific the terms should be. This is a key issue in making a ta...

Orphan Terms in a Taxonomy

A taxonomy has hierarchical relationships between all of its terms, so one of the quality control checks on a taxonomy is to ensure that the...

Synonyms, Alternate Labels, and Nonpreferred Terms

" Synonyms, Alternate Labels, and Nonpreferred Terms " is the title of my next conference presentation in October and in a differe...

Taxonomies and Terminologies

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

Taxonomies and Tables of Contents

A table of contents and a hierarchical taxonomy appear to be quite similar. In my last blog post I looked at taxonomies and indexes , and in...

Taxonomies and Indexes

Taxonomies and indexes are similar in that they both help guide people to find desired information on a selected topic. While they could be...

Taxonomy Terms with “And”

In considering best practices for developing taxonomy term labels or names, there is the question about the use of the word “and” within tax...

Card Sorting and Taxonomies

Card sorting is a common technique in information architecture for developing the organization of menu labels or categories on websites. It ...

Tags and Categories

What does a taxonomy comprise and how does it work? Professional taxonomists may speak of “terms,” “nodes,” or “labels,” whereas most other ...

Topics and Document Types in Taxonomies

It’s quite common in a faceted taxonomy to have a Document/Content Type facet (I’ll call DocType here), whose terms define what a content it...