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Introduction
The term taxonomy is used with different meanings in different contexts. For some industries and organizations, it can be a simple collection of keywords commonly used to group information resources ([5] Holsapple, 2003). In the domain of knowledge organization, taxonomy refers to listing of topics or categories often used to provide a structured navigational path in a content collection ([1] Chaudhry and Goh, 2005). National Information Standards Organization ([10] National Information Standards Organisation, 2005) defined taxonomy as a collection of controlled vocabulary terms arranged in a hierarchical order. [7] Lambe (2007) stated that an effective taxonomy has three key attributes: a form of classification scheme, semantics and a knowledge map.
In general, there are two primary motivations for organizing the information by using taxonomy tools. First, information retrieval, as the hierarchically arranged information allows users to easily find information as well as look for related information. Second, taxonomy helps realize value from discovering relationships in content and affinities between people ([8] Lamont, 2003). In addition, taxonomies are useful tools for creating metadata and categories supporting browsing and navigation ([6] Jagerman, 2006).
Creating taxonomy and deploying it in an organization can be a daunting task. A [2] Delphi Group (2002) report stressed that having a taxonomy construction tool was critical in building taxonomies and improving the information architecture. There appears to be a strong preference to have some assistance in taxonomy development through the use of taxonomy tools. These tools can help to speed up the process of taxonomy construction and aid in taxonomy maintenance. Deployment of taxonomy in an organization involves tagging or classifying the contents, which can also be very time consuming and tedious without the help of automated tools. As classification technology improves, users are beginning to realize the usefulness of such tools even better. Another [3] Delphi Report (2004) stated that 29 per cent of respondents in their survey indicated that having automated classification is critical to the information architecture strategy, 47 per cent indicated they preferred having automated classification, 23 per cent indicated it is nice to have, and only 1% indicated not necessary.
There are many taxonomy tools available in the market and various listing of taxonomy products have been compiled. Some useful references include [9] Lovinger (2008); Search...