Creating Maintaining and Applying Quality Taxonomies

The subject of this book, taxonomies, is narrowly connected to the search and browse for information. A diversity of search methods, indexing languages and classification types pass the foot light to give context to the world of the taxonomy. The focus is on the creation of taxonomies. Three methods of creation are explained. These are the top-down method, the bottom-up method and the faceted approach. Often taxonomy building is seen as the end of the line. But then the work of the taxonomy architect and his team starts. Business rules for taxonomy maintenance (adding, archiving, deleting, moving terms) and naming conventions are explained. Taxonomies are not static documents that should be locked away for safekeeping, but they should be applied to content and knowledge workers. Finally, validating taxonomies, an assessment of the quality of taxonomies is made. For this a part of Quality Function Deployment is applied. Here the House of Quality is described for taxonomies.