Several years back the word taxonomy meant little to others than those in the academic circles or librarians. However, in recent years taxonomies have been gaining in popularity in the corporate world and in medium and smaller organizations. The reason for this can be seen in the incredible growth in electronically created and stored information.
Due to growth in electronic stored information (ESI) companies of all sizes now most develop new and more efficient ways to find and retrieve this electronic information. At one time companies turned to search engines for this task. However, it is estimated Keyword search captures only 33% of relevant information (Source: Chris Wilkie, BBC Information and Archives, Sept 2002). Such searches will identify only those electronic documents containing the precise terms specified.
Gomer the Answer Maven's Golden Retriever
By creating a custom taxonomy organizations can help increase the relevance of their search by making sure all relevant and agreed upon terms are incorporated into the search results. So, if you search for dog you will also get a result which will include k-9, “german shepherd”, “labrador retriever”, etc.
So, it can be easily seen why taxonomies are getting a fresh look from companies big and small, and if I dare say is becoming somewhat of a hip term.
By Miller Montague
Enjoyed the post but doing some research came across the comment below on another blog and was wondering what you thought.
“Taxonomy, although still relevant today, is considered somewhat inadequate to meet the demands of the Semantic Technology i.e. unlike Ontology which is far more complex and powerful. Today, the world is looking more towards ontology rather than taxonomy, although there is still a need for the latter.”
RecordedFutureNow: My partner Miller states: My quick take on the quote is that our audience is more commercial/mainstream so they don’t have much in place to begin with, so taxonomy is a first building block. My next thought is I have a 8 month old who really wants to walk but he needs to get crawling down first. That is how I see implementing a taxonomy and ontology (or you got have a tree before a forest).
I take a bit of different view. Ontology and Taxonomy, will never be sufficient to make Semantic Technology work in and of themselves. Semantic Technology is so much more than defining concepts – the programming required to make semantic searching work is beyond sophisticated. Ontologies and Taxonomies aim to bring order to chaos and customizing a company’s own information around their unique language and their cultural needs is why the two are useful. They can be used together or as Miller suggests, having a taxonomy as a building block will be a good first step in bridging the information void between creation and use.
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