Using Taxonomy to Organize Content
One of the rarely used terms, Taxonomy can be used effectively to organize content on your website. The dictionary defines Taxonomy as the science and practice of classification. What really needs to be understood is how a scientific application like Taxonomy be used for organizing content? Let’s take an example to define the use of this classification methodology. As you are probably aware, there are more than a hundred odd genres in music and some of the most popular ones include rock, pop, metal, jazz and R&B. When your music is classified, you will find it easier to generate a list of genres and in particular you’ll be able to subcategorize the many sub genres of music that can include classic rock, psychedelic rock, garage rock, punk rock, etc. Some of these can further be classified into several sub-sub-genres. This classification of different genres and sub-genres in a meaningful and organized manner via content is known as Taxonomy.
Taxonomy modules are used more often for classification of content, and especially on Drupal websites. If you use Drupal 5 then you will find that the naming of various Taxonomy modules are hugely inconsistent across all administrative interfaces. For example: ideally, it should be Administer>Build>Taxonomy Module page but in reality, the vocabulary has been administered via Administer>Content management>Category page. The module for Taxonomy will permit setting up of vocabularies as a user defined tag, which is known as ‘folk taxonomy’ or any other customer defined term. The Taxonomy module has the capability to organize different taxonomies into specific vocabularies that may consist of single or multiple terms. Some of the principles that are applied to define a vocabulary within a Taxonomy module include:
1. Specific terms as part of every vocabulary. Having unlimited number of vocabularies that will contain unlimited number of terms.
2. You can further divide or categorize each of the vocabulary terms into several hierarchies that are dependent on the various settings for a specific vocabulary.
3. These vocabularies can also be designated as ‘Free tag,’ which means that users can create brand new content and will not require to classify the content using terms belonging to a pre-defined “controlled vocabulary.” Instead, all users will be able to freely define tags or terms.
4. As a user, you will also be able to allow different terms in the vocabularies for defining commonly related terms. This function is quite similar to the see also provision in dictionaries.
Using a vocabulary means that users will be able to attach a single term or multiple terms to different nodes.
If you use multiple vocabularies, then you will be able to classify a single node in many different ways. Let’s take an example: If you have a music website then you can actually have a node that will represent a particular genre of music using a music-genre specific vocabulary as well as a time-specific vocabulary that will include terms like twentieth century, fifteenth century, etc. This will definitely help in organizing all the content required for your website.
Finally, Taxonomy can add depth and value to your content, making it richer and more organized; helping search engine crawlers to freely scan your website content.
By Jeremy Hermanns | June 16, 2008 | Filed Under About, New Technology, SEO Tools
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