Heather Hedden, senior vocabulary editor at Gale/Cengage Learning, in a recent blog post in The Accidental Taxonomist, notes that faceted taxonomies are becoming common. She adds that when designing facets, some of the facets and their terms for a content collection may be obvious. However, the task of creating a Subject facet, for tagging topics related to the content, can be daunting.
Why is the process of creating Subject facets intimidating? For one, it can be quite large when it is used in taxonomies for tagging and retrieving content in a collection; library; repository of published articles; or in research studies; reports; manuals; presentations; speeches, educational/training materials; images; and videos. Similarly, if a large number of terms are required to cover the length and breadth of content, then Subject facets might have its own internal hierarchical taxonomy or thesaurus. This will add complexity to the task of creating Subject facets.
Correspondingly, coming up with a large number of Subject terms involves more effort. In addition, an entirely different approach has to be taken as the terms in the Subject facet need to be based primarily on the subject of the content items being tagged. Furthermore, the process of creating Subject facets appears overwhelming because, techniques such as stakeholder interviews and search query logs are not helpful in the creation of Subject facets.
Click here to read an approach that works for creating Subject facets.
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