Author archives

Heather Hedden is a taxonomist and author of the book The Accidental Taxonomist (Information Today Inc., 2010, 2016). Heather has designed and developed taxonomies and metadata strategies for web and internal content management both as an independent consultant and as an employee in different organizations, currently Gale/Cengage Learning. She also teach online workshops in taxonomy creation. She was the founding chair of the mentoring committee of the Taxonomy Division of SLA and was the founder and past manager of the Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies SIG of the American Society for Indexing.

Terms, Tags, and Classification

It is helpful to classify documents or other content items to make them easier to find later. Searching the full text alone can retrieve inaccurate results or miss appropriate documents containing different words from the words entered into a search box. A document or content management system may include features for tagging, keywords, categories, indexing, etc. Taxonomist Heather Hedden identifies the difference between these elements to facilitate the implementation of more effective knowledge and content management.

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Subjects: Business Research, Case Management, Competitive Intelligence, E-Discovery, Information Architecture, Information Mapping, KM

Knowledge Modeling

Taxonomist Heather Hedden compares and contrasts the work of creating a taxonomy to that of creating a knowledge model, which also involve inputs of people and content, but where more emphasis is on stakeholder/user input. As Hedden says, “content contains information, but people contain knowledge, so knowledge modeling requires the input of various people, with the input gathered in a comprehensive and systematic way.” This article clearly identifies more facets of the role of knowledge management within organizations in many sectors.

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Subjects: Information Management, KM
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