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There are quite a few products on the market called taxonomy tools. To choose just a few for a comparative evaluation requires narrowing the field a bit. Since taxonomies are typically used for tagging and searching, a number of taxonomy products integrate taxonomy creation and maintenance features along with capabilities such as auto-categorization, human tagging, or search to provide more complex, full-featured solutions. This article, however, looks at products that facilitate only taxonomy creation and maintenance.
Taxonomy tools are used by individuals who call themselves taxonomists or who otherwise are familiar with best practices for creating taxonomies, including librarians, controlled vocabulary editors, lexicographers, and some information architects. The tools are not difficult to use, but creating a good taxonomy requires specific skills and knowledge of categorization practices. The use of the software alone does not necessarily result in a usable taxonomy, just as a good HTML editing tool does not necessarily result in a good website if the user is not skilled in the techniques of web design.
There are different definitions and types of taxonomies: simple lists of terms with synonyms, hierarchical trees, faceted categories, standard thesauri, and complex ontologies. The products reviewed here serve the creation of all of these types of taxonomies, except for limitations in ontologies. The designation "taxonomy" can refer to all of these or, more specifically, to a hierarchical, tree-type taxonomy. We will refer to taxonomies in the broader sense. An information retrieval thesaurus can be considered a more complex type of taxonomy, which supports not only hierarchical relationships but also associated term relationships, cross-references from nonpreferred (used for) terms. The products evaluated here each support these thesaurus characteristics, so they are marketed as "thesaurus construction tools," rather than taxonomy tools. Yet thesaurus tools are the best options for creating a simple hierarchical taxonomy as well.
The basic requirement of a taxonomy tool is to maintain terms and their associated relationships and other attributes. The relationships are reciprocal between pairs of terms, so by using a taxonomy tool, the user only needs to create or edit the relationship in one place. If the user decides to rename or delete a term, all its relationships will reflect the change. Support for optional scope notes and user-defined classification categories for each...