Editor's note: I was so glad that Michele agreed to write this chapter. Not only is she fun to work with, she is also a proper taxonomy and search geek. We’ve both had the experience of being asked to make an enterprise or e-commerce search work just like Google (spoiler: this is near-impossible if you don't have the money and developers that Google does). This chapter packs in a lot of detail about, among other things, search engines, facet design and synonyms.

Introduction

As a taxonomy and information architecture consultant over the past 20 years, I have worked with dozens of organisations in industries ranging from public health education to snowmobile manufacturing. The domain, asset types, users and business goals are always different but the struggle with how to best connect people with information remains a constant.

Whether you are managing content, products or digital assets, such as images and video, taxonomy can play a critical role in supporting search from both a back-end and front-end perspective. When search is supporting several systems, either through a federated or pure enterprise search engine, having a unified organising system becomes even more important in order to provide users with intuitive, relevant and consistent results.

In the case of content, taxonomy and other metadata elements enhance the out-of-the-box text indexing and help make the link between natural/free text and your structured and controlled information architecture. While search engines are constantly refining and advancing the algorithms used to parse and extract meaning from text, they can still benefit greatly from the addition of taxonomy driven metadata. In the case of products and digital asset management (DAM), search is totally reliant on the metadata associated with the object (excepting cases of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), which can, in some cases, derive an understanding of a digital object – but even then, dig down and you will find taxonomy supporting the underlying ontology!).

Understanding the different ways in which search can leverage taxonomy will help you understand the impacts on taxonomy design including:

• • considerations for term selection and form

• • the importance of having a semantic hierarchy

• • how extensive and rich your synonyms need to be (and which kinds)

• • other term metadata that may be needed (e.g., associative relationships).