Taxonomy and information organization for the distracted

Starting a conversation about taxonomy is always interesting since most people believe that have never come into contact with taxonomy and know little about it. But the truth is the taxonomy or at least examples of taxonomy, are present in people’s daily lives, even if they don’t realize it.

A good initial example about what is the taxonomy purpose, very utilized by professors and information professionals, is to imagine a simple walk to the market. Presuming that you need to buy pasta, tomato sauce, and soap, what is the first thing that you do when you enter a supermarket that is completely unfamiliar to you?

You probably need to have a minute to understand how the shelves are organized, but you’ll not have difficulty seeing how pasta and sauce share similarities and how you can find them in a different category compared with the soap.

You can see this difference because infers, using basic knowledge of the organization, that pasta and sauce are items that can be eaten, unlike soap, so you categorize the first two as food. The third is categorized as a personal hygiene item, and thus understands that they should be on different shelves and begins your search based on these inferences.

This is a categorization exercise that people do on a daily basis, without even realizing it, but that conducts and assists their shopping, household, work organization, and so on. This categorization capacity is strategically used by companies from different sectors to create fluid consumption not only in physical environments but also in the digital environment, which is our subject of discussion in this text.

Taxonomy intends to organize information in a structured and systematic way, seeking to normalize it to generate fluidity in information consumption. For this, the semantic knowledge of users is used, within a specific domain. The domain is the universe in which the subjects to be treated are inserted. This means that the taxonomy is formed when we connect, organize and structure the digital content to the user’s knowledge, preferences, and worldview.

It is also an essential part of the work of Information Architecture, which deals with the organization, labeling, and website design projects, software, and similar. Therefore, taxonomy allows the definition of the layers that will constitute the labels, making it possible to create relationships and organize items in a system in a clear and fluid way.

A good organization of information helps to reduce the difficulty of navigation, which directly impacts user satisfaction. But to achieve a good information organization it is necessary to have some tools, and to illustrate I share two examples below:

Categorization and classification

There is a difference between categorizing and classifying. Categorization is a creative and flexible exercise, as the initial example of this text, in which a grouping is created for items that share the same idea. There are several ways to create categories in an extensive way if necessary, generating larger categories that contain smaller ones and result in an organization based on similarities. For example, in the case of a fashion e-commerce taxonomy, in which all high-heeled shoes are grouped, and for them, a category called Heels is created.

The classification is a more complex and rigorous exercise, where it uses tools of the Librarianship for the accomplishment of the same. The object to be organized, in this scenario, is part or not of the class, in particular, there is no flexibility to create new classes. There are classification codes that can be consulted for this, such as the CDD (Dewey Decimal Classification). It is an excellent tool for massively classifying items of the same class, in addition to having the possibility of generating a specific location helping to recover this information.

Hierarchies

They are constituted by hierarchical relations called father and son, in which the term son maintains a subordinate relation in relation to the term father.

For example:

architecture>landscape architecture>gardens

In this example, Architecture is the parent term of landscape architecture which in turn is the parent term of the term gardens, thus constituting a hierarchical relationship between the three terms.

In addition to these tools that are used to create taxonomies, there are other skills that can assist with the taxonomist’s daily assignments.

The plurality of people and points of view, for example, is an essential exercise, since, for taxonomy to be comprehensible to different types of users, different points of view need to be considered and discussed, so knowing how to work in groups is one of the most important soft skills.

There is also the ability to strategically plan the way information is organized, thinking long term. An essential exercise for a good competitive position of the company, helping to create a broad portfolio that can be shared by other similar users and thus increase the chances of growth of the company.

Finally, in addition to the tools mentioned above, the ability to listen to what the user says, how he speaks and to whom he speaks is the way we conduct taxonomy at Birdie, to show customers in an organized way what information is being produced about your products.