Are You Maintaining Your Taxonomy?

Once you have deployed your Knowledge Portal or Knowledge Management (KM) System’s taxonomy, controlled vocabulary, information architecture, achieved initial search engine optimization (SEO), and deployed to your users, you’re done! Hold on… You’re not done yet! As a matter of fact you have just begun! Now you must execute your strategy on how you will maintain the knowledge portal’s taxonomy and its underlining taxonomy infrastructure.

In your Knowledge Management Strategy, indicating how your organization will maintain the underlining taxonomy infrastructure, which involves the requirements, and tools, will be essential to the ongoing success of the Knowledge Portal (KM System). When you think of what requirements are needed consider the following:

• How easily and can categories added, edited, or deleted?
• How easily and can relationship types and relationships between your knowledge and its associated content be defined, edited, or deleted?
•  Does a change propagate to all instances?
•  What users and their permissions need to be established on an ongoing basis?
•  Determine what assignment or modification of privileges to one or a group of items is needed?
•  Taxonomy Governance requirements (approval, new, change, etc. workflows that maybe needed or modified)
•  Metadata/Controlled Vocabulary requirements (assign attributes to a category, associate controlled vocabulary with metadata field, and thesaurus capabilities)

In determining what tools you should utilize to assist in managing your taxonomy infrastructure consider the following:

• Tools that have Taxonomy Development capabilities, which include establishing user roles and permissions
• Tools that have Taxonomy Maintenance capabilities, which include adding, editing, moving, and deleting items
• Tools that have the ability to assign or modify privileges to one or a group of items
• Tools that have Taxonomy Governance, which lends itself to the development and maintenance of workflows for knowledge content
• Tools that have Metadata Controlled Vocabulary, which includes assigning attributes to a category and associating controlled vocabulary with metadata fields as well as Thesaurus capabilities
• Tools that have custom reporting capabilities
• Tools that have application integration APIs (WSDL, Scripts, etc.)

Below is a table containing some of the most widely used taxonomy/controlled vocabulary tools in currently use. I would encourage you to contact these vendors and also refer to the latest Gartner, and Forrester analysis before you decide to bring a vendor in for further discussion.

TAXONOMY TOOLS