Improving search using controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies

Improving search using controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies | The discovery blog – Semantico.

Publishers and information providers are building ever larger silos of content. Unless this growth is matched with improved search and discovery, users will be faced with retrieving ever larger numbers of search results and spending increasingly more time looking for the content they need. Intelligent use of taxonomies can help with this problem by providing better search including faceted navigation and filtering of search results.

In this series of posts I’ll be examining the steps publishers and information providers need to take to develop and implement taxonomies. Understanding the differences between controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies is an important first step in the process.

A visual comparison

First off, I think its a good idea to see the relative benefits of controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies compared with the costs of their implementation. But before I can cover this in more detail, its important to understand the territory. I’ll explain each term below and show how they build and relate to one another.

Controlled Vocabularies

Continues @http://blogs.semantico.com

Related articles

• Does Taxonomy Matter in a New World of Search and Discovery (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)
• DAM Best Practices | Metadata and Taxonomy Maturities (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)
• An Executive Intro to Ontologies (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)
• 5 reasons why publishers should care about geolocation (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)