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The word taxonomy means the science of classifying things, and traditionally the
classification of plants and animals

as a kind of controlled vocabulary that has a hierarchy (broader term/narrower
terms),

in a taxonomy all terms belong to a single, large hierarchy that encompasses all
concepts of a certain class, category, or aspect. The structure is sometimes
referred to as a “tree” and the terms as “nodes” in the tree.

a tree-hierarchical controlled vocabulary lacking more complex relationships
found in thesauri

all terms in the thesaurus have relationships to each other

Thesauri are most often used in indexing periodical literature, especially over
a period of time

specialized subject areas

confusion in terminology

facilitate agreement between the concepts within the site and the vocabulary of
the person using it.

type of metadata

increase findability

display relationships among the various concepts

An uncontrolled vocabulary simply uses the natural language of the documents
and matches that with the natural language of the user. This is extremely
specific, and it gives the user exactly what they ask for. Sounds great right?
Consider, however, a site about chemistry, where many of the documents use the
chemical name of the element (“iron”), and many use the chemical symbol of the
element (“Fe”). Using an uncontrolled vocabulary, the results will only include
the terms entered by the user. If the user entered “Fe” in the search box, he
will not get any of the results for documents that use the term “iron.”

It can help you formulate your homepage navigation

potentially useful associative relationship

often difficult and time consuming to maintain

regularly updated controlled vocabulary can help connect the concepts your users
have in their heads to the concepts you present on your site. That is when real
communication will occur.