Taxonomy Warehouse

In 2006, Cycorp, Ibuki and Paoli, and Intellisophic joined the Taxonomy Warehouse Partner Network, joining Thomson Gale and WAND in the trusted community directory and information source for a full array of vocabularies. It provided enterprises, academic and government organizations with the information they needed to categorize internal and external data collections and ensures that relevant answers to search queries are found quickly and easily. Visitors had access from a single source to more than six hundred fifty taxonomies, produced by nearly three hundred publishers in forty languages, and arranged in seventy-three subject domains.

Curated taxonomies play a critical role in searching collections by providing a structured framework that helps to organize and classify information effectively. Here's why they're important:

1. Improved Search Accuracy: Curated taxonomies categorize items based on multiple characteristics, thereby increasing the relevance and precision of search results. For example, in a digital library, a book might be categorized by its author, genre, publication date, and subject matter. This means that users can find what they're looking for more accurately, whether they search by author name, genre, or subject.
2. Enhanced Browsing Experience: Curated taxonomies allow users to browse collections in an organized and intuitive way. If users are not sure what exactly they are looking for, they can browse through categories of interest.
3. Facilitating Discovery: By providing related categories or "see also" references, taxonomies can help users discover content they might not have found through a simple search. For instance, a user searching for a book on a specific topic might discover related topics of interest.
4. Context and Relationships: Taxonomies can help users understand the context of an item within a larger collection and can reveal relationships between items. This is especially valuable in educational or research contexts.
5. Consistency: A well-maintained taxonomy ensures consistency in the way items are categorized, making it easier for users to predict where they might find certain types of content.
6. Scalability: As a collection grows, a good taxonomy can scale with it, making it easier to add and categorize new items.
7. Support for Advanced Features: Taxonomies can support more advanced search and browse features, such as faceted search, which allows users to refine their search results by selecting multiple criteria.

For all these reasons, curated taxonomies are essential tools in information architecture and are widely used in libraries, museums, websites, content management systems, and other digital platforms where users need to search for and retrieve information efficiently.