Taxonomy Services

In support of our customers implementing on-line learning applications that require taxonomy based classification of learning objects, Eedo offers two types of taxonomy services:

• Evaluation of existing taxonomies
• Development of new taxonomies based on content and information retrieval needs specific to your organization

For taxonomies currently in use or under development within an organization, Eedo provides expert evaluation services. A variety of inter-related issues are typically addressed during this process, the over-riding one being whether the taxonomy meets the information retrieval needs of the user population. The more precisely the taxonomy matches the users’ subject needs, the less time can be spent searching for the best access point in a taxonomy and the more time can be spent on using the information productively.

Taxonomy development is a top-down undertaking with a primary focus on user needs. Eedo has developed a taxonomy development methodology which consists of five (5) inter-related tasks. These are described below:

Domain and Scope Definition Definition of a taxonomy’s domain and scope requires that several basic questions be asked and answered: What is the subject domain that the taxonomy will cover? How will the taxonomy be used? For what purpose? What are the questions that the taxonomy have to answer? Who will use the taxonomy? Interviews with project managers, users and content producers will usually be required in order to provide a complete set of answers.

Review of Subject Domain Authorities It is important to consider what others have done. Do relevant classification schemes or controlled vocabularies already exist and should they be incorporated? For example, a taxonomy for the Pharmaceutical industry should always consider the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), a deeply influential standard. A standard for products and services is the United Nations sponsored UN/SPSC taxonomy.		Discovery / Extraction of concepts contained in content This step includes the discovery, extraction and documentation of all terms/concepts (words, phrases, sentences) relevant to the subject domain. It is important to compile a comprehensive list at this point without worrying about overlap between concepts or relationships among the terms Depending on the circumstances, this might be a manual or an automated process.
Organization of concepts into unifying taxonomic dimensions In order to organize the concepts extracted and documented in the previous step, it is necessary to identify and name a limited set of unifying dimensions or perspectives and then associate each of the concepts that have been extracted with one of these dimensions.		Validation One aspect of validation is the comparison of taxonomic dimensions against the knowledge gathered during the Domain and Scope Definition task. The validation task also reprises all previous steps to insure that decisions are reasonable and correct, that no important content has been missed, and that the level of detail within and across the dimensions is appropriate and consistent.