Building a corporate taxonomy: benefits and challenges

The preliminaries
Roles and responsibilities

Identifying who should ‘own’ the corporate taxonomy can be a difficult task for organisations that are new to such projects. In many large enterprises there will already be a corporate librarian, and their ‘information science’ experience will make them the natural candidate for this role.

Alternatively, an existing knowledge manager – or knowledge management team – will take on the responsibility of ownership.

If neither of these options already exists, the organisation will need to create a new role – and ensure that the appointee gets the training and, equally important, management support that they will need to be effective in what can be a politically sensitiveposition.

in Building a corporate taxonomy: benefits and challenges [Pdf format]

[ABSTRACT: Taxonomies are a fundamental part of any modern information architecture.
Any organisation that needs to make significant volumes of information
available in an efficient and consistent way to its customers, partners or
employees needs to understand the value of a serious approach to taxonomy
design and management.

However, many organisations are unfamiliar with taxonomy development and
management. At its simplest, a taxonomy is a hierarchical organisation of
categories used for classification purposes. Such a simple definition hides the
many challenges to be faced in building and maintaining an effective and
usable taxonomy for your organisation.

This report explains why taxonomies are a key issue for many organisations,
and looks at the benefits they bring and the challenges to be faced in
developing and maintaining a corporate taxonomy. It also examines the role of
categorisation tools in taxonomy design and maintenance, and looks at future
technology trends.]

See also my previous post

Taxonomy of Faiths: A semantic journey