Website Taxonomy is an important thing for your business. Website taxonomy is a classification of your website content. It helps in organizing and categorizing the content on your website. A well-organized site will have an easier time attracting customers as they are able to find what they are looking for with less difficulty. However, it is not always easy to do it. Keep reading What Are The Principles Of Using And Maintaining A Taxonomy? We will share with you a tool to make it professionally: IAB Tech Lab’s Content Taxonomy.
What are the principles of using and maintaining a taxonomy?
Consistency
The key in any taxonomy is consistency. The terms of the taxonomies should be self-exclusive and, if possible, use the same organization principle, whether thematic, geographical, chronological, etc. However, on some websites it will be unavoidable to use more than one categorization principle, such as audience, activities, topics, etc. Hierarchical relationships should also be consistent and based on some logical principle, such as class-subclass, or whole-part.
Lettering.
The labels or words to express the terms of both categories and subcategories must be well selected, clarifying and consistent with each other. For example, this list of Categories (taken from a real site) doesn’t make any sense: International | World | Sports… What is the difference between World and International? A more coherent could be National | International | sports…etc.
Format.
In the absence of other criteria (e.g. based on user studies) nouns are often preferred over verbs or other forms: Games, instead of Play. Likewise, the plural is usually preferred in countable things, while the singular is used for uncountable things (water, air), names of scientific disciplines (Physics, Law) and names of materials (iron, carbon).
So-called uniterms, such as Tourism, are preferred over compound terms such as Tourism in Europe. It is best to use Tourism and Europe as separate terms, and assign them to Entries that deal effectively with tourism in Europe. On the other hand, compound names should be kept if their separation makes them lose their meaning, for example, Political Economy, let alone if the compound term is a single concept, as in Motor Vehicles. Among different ways of referring to the same concept, the one that is best known will be preferred, as opposed to the most specialized.
Justification
By this principle, we mean when or what justifies creating a taxonomic term. The categories have a very clear justification: they express the main themes or functions of a site.
One concept = one term
This principle tells us that there should not be more than one term for the same concept. In other words, there should be no synonymous terms. It corresponds to choose one of the synonyms and use only one. On sites with a large number of terms, forwards can be used in case of presenting content indexes.
Limited changes
This principle seems contradictory to the idea that taxonomies should be edited and maintained, an idea that implies discretionary changes. However, it is necessary to try to reconcile both principles. The reason is the following: each taxonomic term in a CMS like WordPress is a page with a certain URL. If the changes involve removing terms because, for example, we have detected two synonyms and merged them into a single term, we will be removing pages from the site, which implies the need for redirects or the risk of broken, internal or external links. Redirects can be a good solution as long as we don’t end up generating hundreds of them due to repeated Tag changes, for example.
Take Advantage Of Taxonomy 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 things like 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
Thank You For Reading What Are The Principles Of Using And Maintaining A Taxonomy?
Also published on Medium.