Taxonomy tools & techniques

April, 2001

Results of an informal survey

How are companies managing their classification efforts? Who is taking responsibility, how are they getting funding, what tools are they using, how much are they spending, and how do users benefit? This article summarizes the results of several recent surveys, including interviews conducted by one Society member, responses from other Society members, remarks made at Montague Institute roundtables, and published articles and reports.

Companies show a surprising range of approaches to taxonomy development and deployment, but the business case is pretty consistent -- improve information retrieval, share knowledge, and reduce content production costs. Because the approaches and applications are so varied, it's difficult to obtain meaningful cost comparisons, even for companies in the same industry.

Includes chart.

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Created on April 23, 2001