In episode 73 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Simon Bate talk about the benefits of establishing a taxonomy.
“Filtering is possible through the use of taxonomies. They have a real world benefit for people looking to find something.”
—Simon Bate

Related links: 

* Tips for developing a taxonomy in DITA

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @simonbate

Transcript: 
Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode we talk about the benefits of establishing a taxonomy. This is part one of a two-part podcast.
GK:    Hello, and welcome everyone. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
Simon Bate:     And I’m Simon Bate.
GK:     And we are going to be looking at taxonomy today, and talk about some of the benefits that you might encounter if you establish a taxonomy within your organization. So I think the logical first place to start is just by defining, what is a taxonomy?
SB:     That’s a great place to start. So a taxonomy is an organizing scheme that helps us make sense of stuff. Let me give a couple of examples there. One is, if you go into the library and you try and find a book, usually you’ve used something like the Dewey decimal system or the Library of Congress system. That’s an organizing scheme. Another organizing scheme that we’ve learned about in school is the way that plants and animals get placed into kingdom, genus, species, and so on. These are a couple of the most well known taxonomies. And also if you’ve shopped on Amazon, you’ve encountered taxonomies there.
GK:     Right, if you have ever used any of the tools that they have to help narrow down some of the products to what you want to buy, that’s definitely a great example. So continuing along that path, can you use multiple taxonomies simultaneously?
SB:     Yeah you can. Let’s look at the Amazon example a bit more. Assume that you’re interested in buying a shirt. There are a number of characteristics of shirts that can be used to categorize or limit your search results. Do you want a red shirt? Do you want a green shirt? Color is one of the taxonomies. What size do you want? Small, medium, large and so on. That’s another taxonomy. Do you want a long sleeve shirt? Short sleeve, sleeveless. What material do you want, cotton, silk, rayon, casual or formal? All of these things which we call facets in taxonomies can be used to narrow down the options, so you can find just the shirt that you want. If you’ve ever used a used car finder, there’s exactly that same kind of filtering is done there. And that was made popular quite a number of years ago. All this filtering is possible through the use of taxonomies. They have a real world benefit for people looking to find something.
GK:     Yeah, absolutely. And I know that’s something I think all of us have used in our day to day lives at some points, not just in maybe our careers in terms of content, but going more in that direction, how else might you use taxonomies, what else are taxonomies good for?
SB:     Well, one of them is for standardizing data. So if you think about looking for a shirt and you’re looking for a medium, there’s a whole number of different ways, actually, that a vendor might describe something as being medium. They might just use a capital M, they might use Medium with a capital M, they might use medium, all lower case, medium, all upper case, they may use size range,