The Art of Taxonomy: Creating Concept-Rich Services

Understanding and organizing data is increasingly important as organizational repositories and websites grow in size and add more content -- including content uploaded by visitors. The Art of Taxonomy introduces low-cost, low-risk tools and techniques for using taxonomies to help. With them, you can implement high-performing applications, manage websites and content management systems (CMS), improve search results, direct visitors to content of interest, and even predict trends in your field.

The Art of Taxonomy shows you how to improve search and navigation to your data, supply links to related content, and target feeds to different audiences. Thoroughly practical and bolstered by in-depth case studies, this book will teach managers, site administrators, programmers, and content contributors how to deal more effectively with the systems that emerge on their sites.

• Learn the definitions of, and purposes for, taxonomies
• Understand types of design, such as controlled vocabularies, hierarchies and polyhierarchies, and facets
• Build better searches using taxonomies and metadata to improve relevance and make it easier to zero in on the desired information
• Use taxonomy analysis to predict trends in your field
• Work with user tagging and folksonomies and use them to improve data access in other places
• Get a solid background in the tools of the trade, such as semantic tagging with XML and RDFa, how existing taxonomies can be transformed into modern ontologies with OWL and Protege, and using methods for simplifying relational databases or XQuery to store and retrieve structured data
• Learn simple methods for managing change in the taxonomy