A taxonomy is a way of categorizing and organizing items, things, or words. In the corporate world, a taxonomy is the way your organization speaks about, searches for, enriches, and categorizes its documents, digital assets, and products. A well-contrustructed taxonomy allows people within the organization to easily organize and categorize their thoughts and workflows. From a digital asset management (DAM) perspective, a taxonomy allows you to easily categorize assets and the metadata associated with them into intuitive groups. This makes the creation and management of controlled vocabularies, folder structures, and permission groups far easier.
While the creation of a corporate taxonomy is time consuming, start small. Define how your organization wants to search for and talk about digital assets. If a department, action, or idea has several names, decide on one and document it. Create clear categories for your departments, services or products, people, processes, and more. Then list all the applicable search terms for each of those categories and go through the process of keeping, killing, or combining the terms you’ve listed.
