This post on taxonomies aims to demystify the idea; in doing so, helps readers lose their fear of using it to organize content on websites. For some reason, the term seems to imply a complex cognitive process, so once we understand that taxonomy is simply classification by another name, we are well on our way. Even if we lose some precision, we will try to present the ideas in this entry in a direct manner. So keep reading Do you know what a taxonomy is? Take advantage of it with this API, we will share with you a great tool: IAB Tech Lab’s Content Taxonomy.
Do You Know What A Taxonomy Is? Take Advantage Of It With Text Classification IAB Taxonomy
The Content Taxonomy has evolved over time to provide publishers with a consistent and easy way to organize their website content. For example, to differentiate “sports” vs. “news” vs. “wellness” material. IAB Tech Lab’s Content Taxonomy specification provides additional utility for minimizing the risk that content categorization signals could generate sensitive data points about some things. Some examples are race, politics, religion, or other personal characteristics that could result in discrimination.
Some frequent questions…
What this API receives and what your API provides (input/output)? Just pass the text that you want to categorize and you will get its IAB taxonomy. Simple as that!
What are the most common uses cases of this API? This API is useful to help those companies with a large amount of data that needs to be sorted by category. Thus, you will be able to gather text by grouping it by category. Besides, ideal for marketing agencies that want to extract data online and want to categorize it as well. Also, helpful to classify sentences or slogans, you will get the exact categorization in IAB standards.
Are there any limitations with your plans?
Besides API call limitations per month:
Testing Plan: 5 requests per second.
Basic: 10 requests per second.
Pro: 30 requests per second.
Pro+: 60 requests per second.
If you want to know more about this API we recommend…
Classify Any Text You Want And Improve Your Business With This API
But, if You Do Not Know What Taxonomy Is…
To start, let’s look at an illustration of taxonomy used on The Guardian’s website as a media outlet:
This screenshot reveals a number of categories, like Opinion, Sport, or Culture, each of which is subdivided into a number of subcategories, like Books, Music, TV & Radio, or Art & Design (in Culture). Consequently, this repetitious, straightforward Category > Subcategory structure is a taxonomy.
So… What is a taxonomy?
A taxonomy is an information organization structure that is made up of a set of categories and subcategories, thanks to which we can unite entities (things) that share some common characteristic. For example, Film and Television share the characteristic of being audiovisual products, for which they are subcategories of the Audiovisual Communication category.
The first intrinsic idea of taxonomies is that they are made up of terms, such as Film and Television. These terms refer to categories, concepts, or classes; it depends on the point of view.
The second intrinsic idea of taxonomies is that all terms are related or connected to each other. All terms are part of a parent term or are the parent term on which other subordinate terms depend. In turn, the terms that are on a higher level are part of a term that is top level, although this is not expressed in every case.
Taxonomies can be used for a huge variety of purposes, from organizing books in a library to organizing content on a website. In this way, it can be said that the main function of a taxonomy is to predict where the things we are looking for are going to be. In other words, the main function of a taxonomy is to avoid sequential scans or decrease the number of interactions needed to come across something.
The main virtue of taxonomy is clarity and this derives mainly from logical-semantic coherence, although it is not always easy to achieve.
Finally, we have to note that, until the arrival of the Internet, taxonomies were mostly unknown by that name. There were some exceptions, in some disciplines, like Biology, for example. Taxonomies are much better known as classifications.
Thank You For Reading Do You Know What A Taxonomy Is? Take Advantage Of It With This API
Also published on Medium.