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By James Kelway
Part one »
 This two-part article is a step-by-step guide for those wishing to create new taxonomies for their business unit or client. It will outline the many different elements that make up a quality taxonomy and the pitfalls you should be aware of when starting a new project.
In part two of this article, we look at creating, testing and launching the taxonomy.
Starting Taxonomy Creation
Taking all the components of taxonomy creation into account, the way it must be brought together is a very detailed iterative process. The mapping process begins by looking at content and then aligning user needs. It is probable that you will have a massive amount of data to deal with as you work your way through the elements of a taxonomy.
Remember here just to categorise content and not be concerned with the types of content you have. The navigation scheme can be dealt with later. But try to align users, business and content simultaneously as you work through the content and use as many of the techniques and documents listed in the first part of this article as is possible.
The Straw Taxonomy
It is likely that the creation of the taxonomy will come down to one person, although many different parties will want input into its creation. The team can meet informally but regularly.
The naming of elements is fraught with politics: a way to get around this is to rely heavily on user research. Card sorts, open or closed, can give you a good feel of what your users, editorial or sales teams would like to call different labels. Gather the people who are experienced in the domain and simply work through a draft taxonomy that you have formulated by looking at the content types of the website and interviewing journalists and business owners. Just discussing their view of the industry is valuable grounding to producing the straw taxonomy.
When you present the straw man, expect to get it burnt. The point of these workshops is to thrash out misconceptions with those who know the domain better than you or who can bring another perspective to the task.
It is also in these sessions that you will become aware of the corporate culture in which you need to operate and this may be difficult. However, if you feel the meeting is being railroaded, always pull the meeting back to the user and qualify it with research to back your views up.
Iterate and Test
 Fig 5. Teragram classification software where rules written by a taxonomist classifies the content
Once amendments have been made, revisit the taxonomy with the same team members and also bring in other parties. For instance, sales employees will bring a different perspective than editorial employees. There may be financial considerations that need to be built into the taxonomy to ensure that the site is a commercial success.
Until you reach agreement with all parties and the taxonomy is defined, you cannot start on the navigation scheme and decide how you will display the terms to the user.
The Controlled Vocabulary (CV)
During the process of creation you will discover associative words that belong to the main term. Always make a note of these, as they form the controlled vocabulary that needs to accompany the taxonomy. The different types of words are listed below along with their usage
The CV terms are also really helpful for search engine optimisation (SEO) as they are the keywords that users enter when talking about the category type. The CV details ‘aboutness' around the taxonomy nodes, it gives descriptions, preferred and non-preferred terms.
This forms the basis to test the taxonomy against your content using a categorisation engine - a computer program that classifies content by using linguistic rules to place content in the relevant areas. The results of these tests will determine how good your taxonomy is at reflecting the content that it endeavours to describe. Don't worry if you do not have the skills to run these tests as it is something your web development team should be able to undertake with help from the categorisation software company.
Fig 6. Relationships between different terms in a controlled vocabulary
Each taxonomy category is named using a formal label. This is what your project team will have decided to call this category / taxonomy node, also known as the Preferred Term.
Non-Preferred Terms are synonyms and alternative names. Included in the Non-Preferred Terms are candidates for labelling. The Non-preferred terms will also ultimately include common misspellings, plurals etc. to enable users to land in the right part of the taxonomy structure and to assist SEO.
Related Terms: indicates other nodes in the taxonomy to which there is a notional link, if not a formal one. This relationship is important to allow serendipitous browsing. For instance digital cameras could have the relational term of Camera Phone.
Search Terms: Words and phrases pertinent to this subject which can be used when creating rules for automatic categorisation. These are not listed in any order of importance nor have they been tested, but should be considered as candidates for rule creation.
These search terms are not necessarily the same search terms (from seed keywords or social network site data) which may give rise to the creation of the taxonomy node.
Fig 7. An example of the relationships within the Catering industry
Final Schema
Once the taxonomy and CV have been finished and been tested on new content (to ensure the taxonomy holds up to changing content) you can be confident that the taxonomy is robust enough to be rolled out.
Keep in mind that a taxonomy will evolve as the content it describes changes over time. Refer to this article for advice on maintaining a taxonomy.
The final stage is to now apply the taxonomy nodes to the navigation schema. Ensure that the different labels reflect the underlying nodes, but do so in language the user understands. The results of user research will help here.
Fig 8. The step by step guide of creating a user centred taxonomy
Creating and Maintaining Taxonomies: Step-by-Step Summary
1. Assemble the team - include business owners, sales, content providers, user experience, marketing and interaction designers
2. Scope out the taxonomy requirements - elements gained in understanding the business will help here
3. Analyse data - take as many sources as possible from understanding the users and the content
4. Propose a taxonomy - take your straw taxonomy to the project team
5. Iterate and test - make changes and run tests against the content, both old and new
6. Compile a Controlled Vocabulary - invaluable to SEO and the rules writers for automatic categorisation software
7. Launch and maintain - Monitor the ability of your taxonomy to adapt but expect new nodes to be brought in and redundant ones consolidated over time.
Summary
When building a robust taxonomy, there are many different elements and tools of which you should be aware. You also need to think about how the taxonomy will be displayed to the users and how it will fit within the website design.
Developing a site taxonomy with an interaction designer is a very helpful way to do the design, because the way the site is structured directly affects navigation and interface elements. Interaction designers can be a great sounding board and give immediate visual feedback.
The taxonomy of a site and its structure are the most important areas of website design and a site that fails often has a poor user experience around this area. Get this right and you will be on course to ensuring that your users will have a quality experience because their needs are within the fabric of its design.
Glossary and Definitions (from http://www.searchtools.com/info/classifiers.html)
A directory is an organized sets of links, like those on Yahoo or the Open Directory Project, which allows a web site to display the scope and focus of its content. A directory can cover a single host, a large multi-server site, an intranet or the Web. At each level, the category names provide instant context information to users. Rather than a simple list, such as the results of a search, drilling down into the more and more specific categories (for example Shopping > Clothing > Footwear > Athletic) explains how the pages fit into the larger set of information.
Categorization is the process of associating a document with one or more subject categories. So the entry for a page on cross trainer shoes could go into Running, Manufacturing, Sports Medicine, or Rushkoff, Douglas! All of these are legitimate, depending on the context.
Cataloging and Classification come from libraries, where specialists enter the metadata (such as author, date, title and edition) for a document, apply subject categories to it, and place it into a class (such as a call number) for later retrieval. These tend to be used interchangeably with Categorization.
Clustering is the process of grouping documents based on similarity of words, or the concepts in the documents as interpreted by an analytical engine. These engines use complex algorithms including Natural Language Processing, Latent Semantic Analysis, Bayesian statistical analysis, and so on.
A Thesaurus is a set of related terms describing a set of documents. This is not hierarchical: it describes the standard terms for concepts in a controlled vocabulary. Thesauri include synonyms and more complex relationships, such as broader or narrower terms, related terms and other forms of words.
Taxonomy is the organization of a particular set of information for a particular purpose. It comes from biology, where it's used to define the single location for a species within a complex hierarchic. Biologists have arguments about where various species belong, although DNA analysis can resolve most of the questions. In informational taxonomies, items can fit into several taxonomic categories.
Ontology is the study of the categories of things within a domain. It comes from philosophy and provides a logical framework for academic research on knowledge representation. Work on ontologies involves schema and diagrams for showing relationships in Venn diagrams, trees, lattices and so on.
James worked for Reed Elsevier, for over 8 years, in a variety of roles. While working as a digital art director, he studied for a Masters degree in Design Practice, specializing in UCD techniques. After qualifying, he became an information architect and was responsible for the formulation of the business's information architecture strategy, its implementation among several teams, and the redesign of several major industry websites.
Recently James has moved to Copenhagen and works as an IA responsible for methodology and new projects. On his blog, User Pathways, James records his findings, as well as developments in information architecture, interaction design, and user experience.
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