Taxonomy Expertise

An important step in your project will be to define the metadata and taxonomy needs that will support an organization's goals for categorizing and relating both assets and content. Oxcyon will provide the expertise necessary to not only define this with you, but to incorporate a strategy toward managing it long term. Centralpoint offers robust tools for Data Transfer, Transformation, including the ability to auto apply metadata to both your Structured (Oracle, IBM, SQL, JSON, XML) and Unstructured (PDF, Word, PPT, XLS, Images, CAD) data.

Oxcyon Data Scientists can help implement the right taxonomy for your enterprise, even if it has to be built. Taxonomy is not only unique per industry, but moreover more unique by individual organization. We typically start with a high level, industry specific taxonomy and then being populating with your organization's specific types. From that point, it is an evolving process allowing you to create new taxonomies yourself as new products, services, and laws are introduced. Fortunately, Centralpoint can not only apply new taxonomy for newly created records but can also retroactively update all records with your newly introduced taxonomy.

What is MphC?

Metadata is data about data! Think of metadata as information about an asset beyond the basic filename. Any sort of attribute or element that helps to define or describe a particular image, document, presentation or spreadsheet would be considered metadata. Beyond metadata, things get very granular. That introduces MphC (Multi Poly Hierarchical Classification). This means that these multiple tiers of taxonomy could be nested, and also relative to certain roles or departments within your organization. This taxonomy, security roles, and metadata can automatically be managed via our Data Cleaner mining tools. These tools allow for these complex relationships to be maintained by Centralpoint,scanning any record for certain values (or combinations) so that these multiple taxonomies be added automatically should those rules match.



What is Taxonomy?

Taxonomy is the science of naming, describing and classifying organisms and includes all plants, animals and microorganisms of the world. Using morphological, behavioural, genetic and biochemical observations, taxonomists identify, describe and arrange species into classifications, including those that are new to science. Taxonomy identifies and enumerates the components of biological diversity providing basic knowledge underpinning management and implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Unfortunately, taxonomic knowledge is far from complete. In the past 250 years of research, taxonomists have named about 1.78 million species of animals, plants and micro-organisms, yet the total number of species is unknown and probably between 5 and 30 million.

Taxonomy (from Greek "taxis" meaning arrangement or division and "nomos" meaning law) is the science of classification according to a pre-determined system with the resulting catalog used to provide a conceptual framework for discussion, analysis, or information retrieval. In information management, taxonomy give depth to the traditional metadata most organizations are familiar with today.  Taxonomies are different from metadata in that a taxonomy helps you to organize your content and assets into hierarchical relationships. Classifying content and assets in a taxonomy can make it far easier to search for or browse a Digital Asset Management or Web Content Management System when you aren't sure exactly what you are looking for.  Defining and using a taxonomy can offer additional benefits in that users of the system will be categorizing content and assets using a controlled vocabulary. This controlled vocabulary can be utilized as an integration reference point between different business systems.

In working to define a taxonomy a few best practices should be followed:

Taxonomy should be media independent
Should have a specific use
Should have a logical hierarchy
Should be easy to understand by users in different divisions or departments
Should conform to other published taxonomy standards when possible (see: http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com)
Should not be redundant to other defined metadata
Avoid acronyms or abbreviations where possible
Should not nest further than 5 levels if possible, but Centralpoint supports N-tiered (beyond 5 tier) nesting