I recently joined a three-part webinar series on Taxonomy, presented by Heather Hedden. Heather is also the author of “The Accidental Taxonomist” which I have on my bookshelf.
In the first webinar Heather explained taxonomy types and the similarities (and differences) between taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, thesauri and ontologies.
In the second webinar she explained how and from where one should choose the words when creating a taxonomy.
The last webinar was all about software for creating taxonomies, including some live demos.
So what is a taxonomy? I would say it’s a list of words to aid people (or software) to index whatever needs to be indexed. It involves showing the relationships between concepts and therefore shows broader terms, narrower terms and related terms. For example, when you browse for products on an online shop, someone had to have decided which product would be listed where. That someone created a taxonomy.
For more detail and to purchase the webinar go to the American Society for Indexing website: http://www.asindexing.org/online-learning/taxonomy-hedden/
