Subject areaData and infrastructure
Also known asclassification system
A taxonomy (a classification system) is the order in which the content of a website, or the knowledge of a company, is distributed into categories and subcategories.
Every item has its place and a single official name, so those who write and those who search use the same vocabulary.
On a website the taxonomy decides what the sections are called, how they nest inside one another and which labels can be assigned to an article. It belongs to information architecture, the discipline that organises, labels and structures content. A well-built taxonomy serves the reader, who finds the way, and the search engine, which understands what each page is about and how pages connect.
When the taxonomy is published in a machine-readable format, for example with the SKOS standard, it becomes one piece of structured data and of the semantic web.
An example
A marketing blog sets three sections, "Strategy", "Channels" and "Data", and rules that each article belongs to one section only and receives at most two labels from a closed list. If an author wants to write "social media" in one article and "social network" in another, the list imposes a single form and the pages end up under the same label.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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