Chapter 10. Developing Portal Taxonomy

This chapter introduces the fundamental principles of the taxonomy and offers practical hints about how to create a taxonomy for your portal. As discussed in Chapter 9 and further addressed in Chapter 12, the taxonomy is one of the keys to organizing your content, including site navigation, folder construction, and categories. It may be used for all types of portals, including outward- facing and enterprise portals.

You can think of taxonomy as an organizational map that is used to categorize information related to one or more areas of knowledge. A well-designed taxonomy helps a user locate information that would be difficult to find through a simple search process. The taxonomy provides a context or a knowledge map for documents.

In this chapter, I start by discussing the principal concepts of the taxonomy. I then apply these principles and illustrate several technical approaches toward developing taxonomy. Then I show how developing a corporate taxonomy can solve a real-world business problem. Next I discuss the business value of developing taxonomy, and finally I discuss the various methods for instantiating taxonomy.