Follow the exploration on how to build a better taxonomy for business. I believe current taxonomies are currently lacking. Using a spatial concept of taxonomy, our team has built a taxonomy that is used to power research into Comparables for Mergers & Acquisitions in the evolving sector of Information, Software and Media, and I would like to share our thoughts on how to build a better taxonomy.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
"Meta-terms" in a multi-faceted taxonomy
Most taxonomies have synonyms for their nodes. A good example may be if you have a node for hospitals. Hospitals also could be known as Medical Centers, Clinics, Surgery, Health Service, etc. These are the synonyms typical of any given taxonomy. In the multi-faceted taxonomy, our team uses we have such synonyms, but sometimes we find certain key industry terms that actually span across multiple dimensions. For instance, Trade Books, Trade Magazines, HIMS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems) are terms that can be like a synonym except, they point to nodes in multiple trees. Trade Books are books for consumers. In our taxonomy we then map this term to books in our Industry tree and consumer in our Clientele tree. Trade Magazines are B2B magazines. In our taxonomy we then map this term to magazines in our Industry tree and B2B in our Clientele tree. We call these special terms "Meta-terms", and they act as little mini-maps in our taxonomy, and expands our vocabulary like synonyms do. Later I will describe how we can build more complicated maps and rule sets to build mini-taxonomies that can use new sets of key words to define new ontologies which set on top of our main taxonomy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment