Questions to think about:
1. What is the content that will be organized?
structured or unstructured data, documents, multimedia, etc.
2. Who is the target audience?
internal business users, web end users, etc.
3. How will the taxonomy be implemented? Is this taxonomy part of a tagging process for applying metadata to content?
use for indexing content, bundle with the search tools, etc.
4. What is the goal? Improve searching, categorize content for a system, develop topic maps of domain.
5. How much content is there?
First of all, find out if a taxonomy exists somewhere that you can license or borrow.
Check out existing taxonomies/classifications before building one from scratch. There are many projects out there and I would suggest you check them out:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mfkb/related.html
http://www.asindexing.org/site/thesauri.shtml
http://www.willpower.demon.co.uk/thesbibl.htm
Business Area
London Classification of Business Studies: http://conceptspace.london.edu/
Science - depends which aspect, since there are already areas well established such as the MESH, AOD. MESH: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/cgi/mesh/2K/MB_cgi
IT - I would just rely on Library of Congress Subject Classification since IT is constantly changing and I don't know if anyone has tackled this except as it relates to Business: check out www.business.com structure as a starting point.
I'll continue to add resources and possibly develop a guide on how to get started shortly.
Posted on February 19, 2002 03:06 PM
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