There are many approaches to designing a taxonomy for tagging and retrieving content in intranets or in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. The approach, however, revolves around a fundamental question, whether a single taxonomy would suffice or if there is a need for multiple taxonomies.
While deciding on an approach, a taxonomist needs to address whether a comprehensive taxonomy would serve the enterprise or if there is a need for multiple taxonomies for different sets of content and groups of users within an enterprise. The answer to the question involves issues of information usability, user experience, and mindset. It might also involve a goal of “breaking down silos” by having single enterprise taxonomy or one of encouraging “democracy” among organizational units and letting them create their local taxonomies.
There are many approaches to designing intranet and ECM taxonomies. An approach would involve creating a general enterprise-wide taxonomy and various specific taxonomies. This would ensure that the taxonomies are suited to the content. This approach has a couple of drawbacks. It might create silos and consequently, negatively impact content sharing. In addition, users from other departments may not find departmental taxonomy user-friendly.
Another approach to creating intranet and ECM taxonomies is to design a single comprehensive taxonomy (or set of taxonomies/facets) to cover all the internal information needs of an enterprise. There would be more sharing and ease of having a single taxonomy of terms for users to refine searches. However, tagging would become difficult as in a large and potentially confusing taxonomy; sections of the taxonomy would be irrelevant to some sets of taxonomy. In addition, terms intended for one purpose would be used for another purpose.
Other options are more creative. For instance, an enterprise-wide taxonomy can be created as a master taxonomy, which is both general and specific, along with various specific taxonomies. Subsequently, the specific taxonomies can be mapped term-by-term, to the master taxonomy, which has all terms. Only those who tag will need to use their appropriate specific taxonomies, but for those who search, making use of the master taxonomy can have a federated search experience-allowing discovery and retrieval across the enterprise.
Another creative option would involve the creation of a single comprehensive taxonomy with branches. The advantage is that only the branches of the taxonomy and the associated terms will be visible to those who are tagging the content. The other branches will be hidden from display thereby ensuring that those who tag are not being overwhelmed with a very large taxonomy, much of which is not relevant to their content and contains terms, which could potentially be confusing and misused.
However, the IT department of an enterprise should support these creative approaches by customizing content management and search software accordingly.
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