The document discusses taxonomy development and digital projects. It provides definitions of key terms like controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies. It explains purposes like translation, consistency, navigation, search and retrieval. Challenges like ambiguity, synonymy and polyhierarchies are covered. Guidelines and standards for building taxonomies are also summarized. The value proposition of taxonomies for improving search, productivity and information sharing is outlined.

1. Taxonomy Development and Digital Projects Laura Dorricott Project Delivery Manager, Taxonomy Services Dow Jones Client Solutions January 25, 2009 Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group ALA Midwinter 2009

4. Taxonomy’s Evolutionary Path © 2007, Dow Jones Dictionaries & Flat Lists Hierarchical Taxonomies Controlled Vocabulary Thesauri Ontologies Structured Authority Files Taxonomies are the building blocks for ontologies and ontologies are semantic representations of the real world in all its rich diversity. Taxonomy is evolving organically…

8. SEARCH

10. one thing can have many different names Dr. Peter Roget one word can mean very different things "the elasticity of language"

12. Taxonomy helps people filter out the noise and discover the relevant things regardless of what they are called.

13. NAVIGATE

14. Search and Navigation are not alternative solutions, they are complementary solutions Users expect both

15. Points of view…

16. one point of view…

17. another point of view…

18. Different audiences will have different views and good navigation will serve all of them.

33. Low productivity High frustration Little leverage of information assets Too many search results Too many irrelevant hits The more precise I get the more I miss End-user search illiteracy Multilingual content Ambiguous results Information retrieval issues within companies