What We Do
Taxonomy & Controlled Vocabulary Services
Some of our members work at publishing companies, libraries, or software companies. Many of our members are independent contractors. The types of work our members do include the following:
As in-house staff taxonomists and editors of controlled vocabularies, we:
- Develop and/or manage proprietary controlled vocabulary (subject thesaurus) and authority files (controlled vocabularies of company/organization, people, location, and product names) used to index online databases comprised of periodicals, newspapers, and miscellaneous non-serial documents.
- Convert simple authority files to hierarchical thesaurus structure, with BT, NT, RT relationships
- Create topic trees based on controlled vocabulary terms to facilitate database searching.
- Map (match or reject matchings of) active thesauri/controlled vocabularies with taxonomies or metadata of third-party database vendors or with legacy thesauri to enable cross-searching of databases containing varying subjects and documents.
- Support controlled vocabulary-based searching of online databases through active management of the indexing process, providing guidelines for indexers, and involvement in interface design.
- Create taxonomies for integration with search engine products
Additionally there exist many taxonomists who work on taxonomies used only internally within their own organization, such as integrated with content management systems or for organizing information on their intranets. Such taxonomists tend not to be among this SIG's members.
As independent contractors, we:
- Conduct interviews with stakeholders and take notes to determine enterprise taxonomy requirements
- Determine the top-level categories/facets and create a proposed taxonomy framework (top 2-3 levels) for an enterprise taxonomy
- Conduct term extraction (recording terms that are potential taxonomy nodes) and content analysis on numerous web pages of a company's web site or intranet in support of developing a company's taxonomy.
- Develop top few levels of a taxonomy for classifying news articles and feeds for online news services
- Map (match or reject matchings of) logged search phrases to the controlled vocabulary of web-based products and services directories (yellow pages).
- Research and add/edit attributes to named entity terms in thesauri used for periodical and reference work indexing