Information gathering, draft taxonomy design and building, taxonomy review/testing/validation and revision and taxonomy governance/maintenance plan drafting constitute the steps to follow when building a taxonomy. These steps may overlap slightly, but they remain the key to building a taxonomy. In this article, Heather Hedden, a taxonomist and the author of the book The Accidental Taxonomist (Information Today Inc., 2010, 2016) summarizes the steps.
Information gathering marks the first step and involves two types of information gathering. One is about gathering information on the content and the other is about gathering information about the needs of the users. The former involves analyzing documents, intranet or web pages, database records, digital assets, etc. and determining how to classify what they are about. The latter involves conducting interviews or using questionnaires to learn about the information-seeking needs and behaviors of the primary users of the future taxonomy.
The next step after information gathering is to design and build draft taxonomy. Therefore, it begins with an initial high-level taxonomy design and metadata specification, based on the information gathered from users and some of the content. Building the taxonomy involves approaching the structure from both directions: top down and bottom up. The top-down design and some building come primarily from the information gathered while speaking with the users and other stakeholders. The bottom-up building comes from the index terms discerned when analyzing sample content.
Ideally, the draft taxonomy should be reviewed and tested during one or more stages of the process. Therefore, the subsequent step should be testing. It should ideally involve finding terms to tag content and finding desired content by means of taxonomy terms. This will help in identifying the concepts missing in the taxonomy. Subsequently, the missing concepts can be included or if the meaning is unclear, it can be clarified. Testing that is done when the taxonomy is nearly complete might be called validation.
Documenting the policy for the taxonomy and its usage represent the next step. It should be formulated as the taxonomy is being built and tested. This will help document how issues that crop up are resolved. The elements that make-up taxonomy governance includes taxonomy editorial policy/guidelines and taxonomy use/tagging policy. In addition, it involves framing policies and procedures for updating and maintaining the taxonomy as the taxonomy is expected to evolve.
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