Creating and implementing taxonomies is already a significant undertaking, but what about managing and maintaining your ever-growing taxonomy projects?
Taxonomies are not a one-and-done kind of project. Shifts in the market, changes in terminology and technology, and the steady influx of new information all dictate that a taxonomy should be periodically updated in order to remain relevant and useful to a competitive organization.
A lot of companies will kickoff their taxonomy project with a spreadsheet and quickly lose momentum as their project increases in complexity. Right when things become more cumbersome and difficult to properly maintain—that’s where taxonomy management software can really make a big difference in your ability to keep up with the times.
Looking Far And Beyond For New Taxonomy Management Solutions
There are several reasons why a company might want to invest in a taxonomy management software. The typical tipping point for businesses is when things stop functioning well enough with the taxonomy methods already in place:
- you’ve noticed that sales are declining due to the poor architecture of your retail site,
- competition is offering better search function to get an edge in the market,
- or maybe your employees are spending too much time looking for [reliable] information in your internal systems.
- altogether external and internal pressure can be damning for productivity and drive a lot of complaints to your customer service team.
You are now looking for a taxonomy management software that can help you create a new taxonomy from scratch or redesign one based on your existing taxonomies.
In this article, we will briefly explain what a premium taxonomy management software does and what to look for when you want to replace those spreadsheets and upgrade from your current approach to handling taxonomies.
Top 5 Features of a Premium Taxonomy Management Software
In their “Taxonomy 101” overview, KMWorld explains that many businesses use taxonomy management software to reduce the time they spend on creating, implementing, and maintaining taxonomies and improve the overall consistency of their information management and classification processes.
However, while there are a lot of taxonomy management solutions available to choose from, not all are equally equipped to achieve those goals.
Here’s an overview of the top five features and functionality that you should keep an eye out for when choosing a taxonomy management software:
1. Allows users to import, convert, and modify existing taxonomies
Most organizations looking for taxonomy management software have already been working with taxonomies for a while. Do they want to start from scratch? Of course not. That is why a premium taxonomy management software should allow users to import, convert and modify existing taxonomies. This process should support the import and export of different formats such as RDF, Excel, or any other tabular table. It is also convenient if the software is able to search for and identify inconsistencies and problems with the imported data, and provide repair mechanisms to fix the problems. Read this blog post to learn more!
2. Helps users leverage their taxonomies with linked data
Linked data is a set of semantic web standards for sharing data on the web. It makes data for a specific industry or organization publicly available in a format that can be seamlessly and efficiently combined with other data to provide new services or gain new insights.
Companies use linked data to start a taxonomy from scratch or to leverage existing taxonomies, helping them save time, money and benefit from collective knowledge that would not otherwise be available.
A premium taxonomy management software will provide easy access to a selection of predefined taxonomies like DBpedia, Geonames, Wikidata, etc. It should also give you the option to use third-party taxonomies that have already been published—there are many out there covering a variety of business, medical, scientific, engineering and public policy areas. Check out this vocabulary hub and find out what linked data can do for your business!
3. Sharing taxonomies for peer-review
Taxonomies aren’t something you start and finish in a week, nor are they something you do alone. Once information is organized and indexed in a taxonomy, subject matter experts within the company will need to access it. They will be responsible for subsets of the taxonomy or asked to make revisions, suggestions and additions. Sharing information between departments, business units, or geographic locations should be easy and secure. Premium taxonomy management software should also be able to detect issues with the quality of the taxonomies created, because involving more people in the project can also jeopardize consistency. It should also offer users administrative options like defining user roles and permissions.
4. Supports collaboration with remote teams
Getting started with business taxonomies involves an array of tasks and multiple stakeholders. According to KMWorld, a company’s first move should be to create a framework for the taxonomy by determining a suitable structure for the data it has or will accumulate. Ideally, this step would be taken collaboratively, but that is often easier than it sounds.
It’s likely that you will be working with colleagues who have no prior semantic knowledge and depending on the size of the business, some of them may work in different locations. It may be too expensive for the company to gather all of its subject matter experts and taxonomists in the same room for multiple sessions.
That’s why a premium taxonomy management software should support collaboration with remote teams. Check out this blog post to learn more about how to start your taxonomy from scratch with a remote team.
5. Is standards-based and easy to integrate
The use of open standards offers a high degree of security for your investment. This is because open standards (e.g., W3C standards) help companies become less dependent on a particular vendor. In short, to avoid vendor lock-in.
Moreover, W3C standards like the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) provide a great opportunity to combine corporate information with internet-based resources.
Another advantage of W3C standards is that they help you integrate taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs into your enterprise architecture, allowing you to extract knowledge from texts on the go.
To learn more about taxonomy management and what it can do to support you and your organization, you can start by reading our taxonomy white paper.
