Context Specificity of Taxonomy

Within an organization, a particular piece of information may have a number of different uses, and different knowledge workers may have a different perspective on the same piece of information. For example, let's suppose that a contract has been developed with a vendor. Where within the existing corporate taxonomy should this information reside? The answer depends on who is looking for the information. The legal department would say the contract should reside in the contracts category under that particular vendor. Because the contract represents revenue, the accounting department would suggest the accounts receivable category. Finally the sales department would see the document as a part of a client relationship.

Furthermore, many portals today support the ability of a user to create a personalized taxonomy. Remember that, although multiple views to the same document can be created, only one physical document exists. Generally, the portal stores only the document cards that store the metadata within your infrastructure. On the document card is stored the location of the physical document so the portal can locate that document when the user requests it. The actual document could reside anywhere within the infrastructure of the company. In other words, the document could reside on a file server, on the company's web site, or within a Lotus Notes database. As long as the taxonomy keeps track of the document cards in a local document repository, the user should have no problem locating the document.

Documents are partitioned into logical groupings that are easier to navigate. These allow users to locate information even if they start with a single-word search term . The categories within a taxonomy move from general to more specific. Taxonomies help avoid problems with common English language peculiarities of similar-sounding words or words with multiple meanings. Taxonomies facilitate iterative, drill-down searches that both advanced and beginning users can quickly traverse.

A taxonomy category can be used to limit the scope of a search, thus reducing the number of irrelevant documents returned. The category facilitates browsing of content, allowing a user to traverse a large number of related documents.

Information is filtered based on the attributes of each category. Think of the unstructured information within your business as water that is gushing out of a fire hydrant. The portal taxonomy is designed to catch hold of this information and place it into the appropriate places within the corporate taxonomy

Taxonomies provide flexibility in retrieving content. One of the central problems with finding information, as Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, is that words can mean so many different things. The inherent ambiguity of language makes searching more challenging because items are missed that are tagged with different, but related, terms or extraneous results are brought in because too broad a meaning has been assigned to a search term. For instance, a large Canadian systems integrator unfortunately shares its name , CGI, with the acronym for Common Gateway Interface, a widely used scripting tool for the web. Therefore, searching for "cgi" on a search engine returns thousands of results quite useful for CGI programmers and tens of thousands of pages that contain "CGI" in their URLs ”and perhaps buried deep within the search results, a link or two to the company called CGI.