Recently, a Society member asked us where the taxonomy function belongs in the organization chart. Is it part of a business unit or does it come under an administrative support function, such as the corporate library, publishing, marketing, or IT?

Taxonomy work occurs at every level in large organizations, from creating enterprise thesauri to creating categories for a departmental Web site to assigning tags in a blog or wiki. But when we posed this question to members, most responded that the formalized taxonomy function in their organizations resides in the IT function. This article looks at what taxonomists do, summarizes the findings of our informal survey, and concludes with some comments on how the taxonomy function is evolving.

What do taxonomists do?
The role of the business taxonomist is still evolving. As far as we know, there is no academic degree program or professional association for people who do this type of work. Moreover, the job can be called many things — metadata specialist, business information taxonomist, content publisher, metadata librarian, or ontologist (see "Taxonomy teams: job descriptions"). Although many job descriptions call for a master's in library science, linguistics, or knowledge management, few if any of these programs provide adequate preparation for the full range of tasks to be done.

The core of taxonomy work is the creation and maintenance of controlled vocabularies, thesauri, knowledge bases, and ontologies, but other tasks can include:

• advising project teams and departmental Webmasters;
• developing and conducting training sessions for authors and editors;
• evangelizing about the benefits of taxonomies and metadata;
• helping to select and evaluate software tools;
• writing proposals and documentation;
• developing prototypes.

The importance of coordination tasks in the taxonomy function would argue for a place in the organization chart that affords the broadest reach, influence, and independence — probably one or two levels below the CIO. This view is reinforced by the need to create organization schemes that work with specific software systems, such as search and content management. But an IT-based taxonomy function will work only if:

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Created on July 7, 2007 l Updated on July 10, 2007