The core value and use cases for taxonomy have remained unchanged for the last few decades. Outcomes such as improved findability, discoverability, awareness, alignment, standardization, and understanding, have only gained in relevance. But, why are these outcomes important?
To begin with, taxonomy enhances findability in many ways. For instance, it drives site navigation and information architecture, improves search relevance, and enables filtering and faceting on search. Additionally, taxonomy helps to take findability to the next level i.e., discoverability. By applying consistent taxonomy as metadata on content, content with similar metadata can be shared using push recommendations thereby helping users discover additional information. In short, taxonomy by improving findability and to a greater extent discoverability increases the awareness of the information already available within organizations.
An additional element of findability and discoverability is awareness and alignment. Consistently tagging content and people with a well-designed taxonomy increases the probability of users discovering content similar to the one they are working on. In addition, it also improves their chances of aligning with people having similar or sought-after expertise within their organization.
Moreover, a taxonomy can help standardize disparate systems, people, and processes, thereby enabling organizations to communicate, collaborate, and integrate better. It also results in lowering the administrative burden and greater integration of different information stores and organizational groups.
also gain a better understanding of their content by utilizing taxonomy to master information management. This helps organizations identify and address the gaps in their knowledge, and decide whether content which is no longer of value should be archived or disposed of.
In addition, taxonomies help in keeping organizations ready for implementing innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence. A well-designed taxonomy serves as a critical building block for designing ontologies, which are integral to knowledge artificial intelligence (AI). In practice, these ontologies offer organizations avenues to integrate content, data, people, and everything else that matters to their business, through artificial intelligence.In short, a well-designed taxonomy continues to offer many outcomes that create value for organizations and help them leverage knowledge assets and gain competitive advantage.
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