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One thing that helps a bit in determining how to build a taxonomy is to clearly define the purpose of the taxonomy you are building. We ended up with two classes of taxonomies at Microsoft -- one focused on search and tagging, and the other focused on navigation.
Search and tag taxonomy The first class -- search and tag -- contains the set of keywords that are needed to identify content from an end-user's one- or two-word query. If you segment this into multiple attributes and take advantage of these in your queries, you can build sets of vocabularies that are reusable in many areas (e.g. geographic names, product names, languages, organization names, company names). The rest go into a "subject" vocabulary, which is all the concepts that people look for in search -- e.g. charities, copyright, privacy, violence. The search and tag taxonomy can be extended indefinitely to accommodate local variations.
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