Building Taxonomies: Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Approaches

Question:

Describe how a taxonomy can add value to your Organisation.

Taxonomies has been immensely helpful for any organization and after the arrival of internet organizations are more interested with taxonomies for their structuring as well as retrieval of their information, which are much easier to manage. Taxonomies are an effective approach for helping organizations in meeting the need for meta-knowledge. However, Taxonomies are considered the base of the classification schemes as well as indexing system in the information management just like the Dewey Decimal System. Yahoo is among the first big E-Business company to have successfully utilized taxonomies (Barbuto, 2016). Therefore, taxonomy in the organization helps to find a suitable breakdown. In this report how a taxonomy can add value to the organizations are described along with stating the methodology for developing a taxonomy their potential applications and the ways to get leverage out of that taxonomy.

In building taxonomies, the two wider approaches are top down and bottom up. Top down approach helps the organization evolve wider groups for instance departments, locations or products and then inhabit the taxonomies with terms. Any company will try this approach first where a small group of people will be given a task with explaining a structure for the taxonomy and then certain terms will be added to each area. This can work successfully for the taxonomies, which are simple, or for smaller sets of documents, however, there is a huge amount of assumption in knowing what terms needed to be created (Garcia et al., 2013).

On the other hand, the bottom-up approach begins by examining the content as a whole following which the terms of the taxonomies will be added, formerly deciding on the hierarchy. Explaining taxonomy by inspecting the terms inside the documents is by far very successful technique but executing this manually is very time consuming. However, tools can guide in counting the frequency of the words as well as phrases though they will still need to be categorized and placed manually into the taxonomies. Therefore, it can be said that top down approach is mainly focused on the buttons, tabs and labels whereas, bottom up is focused about the content as well as process analysis (Shameli-Sendi, Aghababaei-Barzegar & Cheriet, 2016).

Descriptive taxonomy is another type that is found in the organizational environment, which supports information reclamation through searching.  However, by expanding as well as maintaining a fundamental set of controlled vocabularies, an organization can constantly label or tag their content along with descriptive metadata determined among these authorized vocabularies. Moreover, vocabularies can also capture the knowledge worker phraseology and map it to an organization’s favored terms. If an organization is creating a descriptive taxonomy then they have to include reviewing entries opposition to an established set of phrase and search for similarities, affinities, differences as well as dependencies (Clerck et al., 2013).

Types of Taxonomies: Descriptive and Navigational

Another type of taxonomy is the Navigational type, which is mainly focused at detecting information mainly through browsing. However, once more here the taxonomy supplies with a controlled vocabulary rather utilizing it in the framework for manipulating doubts. Moreover, it can be help to knowledge employees so that they find the information they need. Navigational Taxonomy comprise of labels exerted to categories of the content based on the knowledge employees’ mental model of how the information is systematized. In taxonomy is totally based on the behavior of the users not on the content. Thus, as an outcome the labels of categories may be differently organized from that of the concept based descriptive taxonomy as navigational taxonomy can also contain words and phrases, which would not meet the standards of the descriptive taxonomy (Bacha, 2012).    

• Organizing information- Corporate Taxonomy will be the main storage design for the organization’s content, which will in a similar way support the interoperability of systems. Therefore, while developing taxonomy it would be beneficial if the structured and unstructured informational sources can be related to common topics (Taylor & Joudrey, 2017).
• Increasing usability- If the corporate data is organized in a single manner then the total utility of knowledge system will grow markedly. Thus, no longer the employees need to retain the methodology behind a particular system just to find a different one for another tool. However, it will help the organization to understand the information that it holds along with what is missing.
• Supporting the growth of the business-, the cost of implementing taxonomy lessons the cost than that of a failure of a project. Therefore, there are substantial potential benefit and instant returns.

Moreover, understanding the content as well as having a thorough understanding of the audience, publishers, content, limitation and platform is very important.

The potential applications of taxonomy are that it permits as well as support both the internal process as well as external features. Internal processes mainly includes content management where as external involves navigation, personalization and search. In the content management, the taxonomy can cite both the hierarchical structure into which the content has been scribed. Taxonomy is also use in search where consistently, appropriately metatagged content support consumers to rapidly find the information they pursue with targeted, precise and detailed search outcomes, despite of the location or language. Internal searches are also efficient as the content managers or the owners of the business are suited to query the content management system to identify the documents as well as files. Taxonomy can be further used in customization by cross matching the content user types with that of the contain comprising similar matatags.  It is further used in navigation because it is easy for content management system as well as tagged content to straightaway generate navigational structures (Emmanouilidis, Koutsiamanis & Tasidou, 2013).

Website organization and search- Organizing the websites are generally done by information architecture web page. However, in maximum cases the templates of the web pages are linked to a content type. At time, the organizations may want to establish other web pages that bonds with special taxonomy elements. It can also support creating widgets along with website search, which also depends on taxonomy.

Customer support- A well-organized taxonomy can also help the customers to rapidly get hold of the information they required to solve their problems. When an organization is aware of their customers then they can easily take advantage of taxonomy to enhance their experience by spontaneously surfacing content associated to the consumer’s particular situation (Park, Geum & Lee, 2012).

Content-as-a-service– This is the ability to generate content and deliver it to various websites, apps, business applications along with other channels as well. However, without a well-organized taxonomy, content re-use or content-as-a-service cannot take place. Taxonomy can further help obtaining the appropriate content into the publishing channel straightaway.

Ecommerce- for the Ecommerce organizations taxonomy helps greatly the consumers to quickly approach the products or services of their choice. For the beginners the related products can be visible in a widget on the product page itself and surface related products in a search. However, taxonomy can also provide associated content like blogs, product related information in the product page so that it can motivate engagement as well as enhance conversions (Wang, 2013).

Conclusion

Thus, from the above report it can be concluded that Taxonomies are excessively helpful when it comes to organizations, as it is an effective approach meeting the need for meta-knowledge. However, it can have many potential applications like in content management system, search, utilizing the metadata for personalization as well as customization and lastly used in navigation. Moreover, the leverage out of taxonomy has been highlighted to be Website organization and search, Ecommerce, Content-as-a-service and Customer support.

References

Bacha, J. A. (2012). Taxonomies, folksonomies, and semantics: Establishing functional meaning in navigational structures. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 42(3), 249-263.

Barbuto Jr, J. E. (2016). How is strategy formed in organizations? A multi-disciplinary taxonomy of strategy-making approaches. Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 3(1).

Clerck, O., Guiry, M. D., Leliaert, F., Samyn, Y., & Verbruggen, H. (2013). Algal taxonomy: a road to nowhere?. Journal of Phycology, 49(2), 215-225.

Emmanouilidis, C., Koutsiamanis, R. A., & Tasidou, A. (2013). Mobile guides: Taxonomy of architectures, context awareness, technologies and applications. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 36(1), 103-125.

Garcia, S., Luengo, J., Sáez, J. A., Lopez, V., & Herrera, F. (2013). A survey of discretization techniques: Taxonomy and empirical analysis in supervised learning. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 25(4), 734-750.

Park, Y., Geum, Y., & Lee, H. (2012). Toward integration of products and services: Taxonomy and typology. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 29(4), 528-545.

Shameli-Sendi, A., Aghababaei-Barzegar, R., & Cheriet, M. (2016). Taxonomy of information security risk assessment (ISRA). Computers & Security, 57, 14-30.

Taylor, A. G., & Joudrey, D. N. (2017). The organization of information. ABC-CLIO.

Wang, D. (2013). Influences of cloud computing on e-commerce businesses and industry. Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 6(06), 313.