Taxonomy

Taxonomy means a classification system that is usually hierarchical in nature (i.e. it has parent/child relationships between terms). Originally a scientific term used to classify living organisms, taxonomies are now used to describe any abstract tree-like metadata structure that is composed of categories, sub-categories and nodes. The relationship between terms is more rigid than an ontology where terms can be inter-connected using a range of polyhierarchical or non-hierarchical systems, for example, venn diagrams or matrices (note that this does not mean that an ontology is superior as a metadata structure - in many cases it is not). In Digital Asset Management discussions, the design of a taxonomy to represent information about assets is important to enable the development of thesauri and controlled vocabularies for metadata entry and searching purposes.