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Custom internal taxonomies

If you have Category Management rights, you can define custom internal taxonomies by creating new Categories and then creating new Keywords within the Categories.

About internal taxonomies

A internal taxonomy defined in Content Manager consists of a nested hierarchy of Keywords defined in a tree structure. A Category defines the root of the taxonomy and a Keyword defines a value within the taxonomy hierarchy. The following image illustrates an internal taxonomy:

When designing a taxonomy for knowledge management, consider the following characteristics:

  • A taxonomy is a form of classification scheme—Classification schemes are designed to group related things together, so that if you find one thing within a category, it is easy to find other related things in that category.
  • Taxonomies are semantic—Taxonomies in knowledge management are primarily semantic. They provide a fixed vocabulary to describe their knowledge and information assets, and this vocabulary needs to be meaningful and transparent to ordinary users. A taxonomy also therefore provides a controlled vocabulary in the sense that the meaning of each label is carefully considered, precise and unambiguous.
  • A taxonomy is a kind of knowledge map—A good taxonomy enables users to immediately grasp the overall structure of the knowledge domain covered by the taxonomy, and be able to accurately anticipate what resources she might find where. A taxonomy should therefore be comprehensive, predictable and easy to navigate. A taxonomy helps you find things based on relationships, using vocabulary that expresses concepts and relationships meaningfully to users.
To create internal taxonomies, you create Categories, and then create Keywords within the Categories. For a hierarchical taxonomy, you can define parent and child relationships between Keywords simply by creating them in a nested structure, plus you can manually define additional relationships to other Keywords.

Creating Categories as taxonomies

From the Taxonomies node in a Publication's structure, you can quickly create new Categories.

The only required information is a display name, but you can also define more advanced settings.

Note the following requirements for certain Category settings:

XML Name
The XML name can only contain letters without accents (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), underscores “_” and/or hyphens “-”. The first character must be a letter or an underscore character.
You cannot change this value once you have created the Category.
Publishable
This option is selected by default. Clear the check box only if you want to make the entire Category unpublishable.
Use for identification
Use of this option depends on how a website is implemented. Define a value only if instructed to do.
Default Metadata Schema
This metadata schema will be applied automatically to all new Keywords that get created within the Category; however, it will still be possible to select a different metadata schema, as needed.

Creating Keywords for taxonomy classification

Within a Category, you can create new Keywords for the internal taxonomy. The only required details for a Keyword are Value and Usage, but you can also define more advanced settings.

Note the following requirements for certain Keyword settings:

Value
The value must be unique within the Category.
Usage
Indicates how the Keyword should be used:
  • Content classification and taxonomy organization—The Keyword represents a concept or value against which you can classify content.
  • Taxonomy organization only —The Keyword will not be used for classification and instead has a strictly organizational function for logically grouping other Keywords. You will not be able to classify content against these Keywords.

To further clarify the two options, take the simple example of a parent Keyword called Size and its child Keywords called Small, Medium and Large. You want to use all three child keywords to classify content, such as product Components for various articles of clothing. You do not, however, want the parent Size to be used for content classification, so you would select the second option to restrict use of Size to be for organization only.

Key
This optional field can be used for a variety of purposes, such as to associate an external resource to the Keyword, for example a product ID. If you do specify a Key, it must be unique across the BluePrint.