Intelligent navigation is a Content Delivery API that allows you to generate website navigation, and other navigational features, from taxonomy hierarchies created using Categories and Keywords.
Note: This feature works only with internal taxonomies defined with Keywords. Currently, external taxonomies managed in Taxonomy Space are not supported. For external taxonomies, you can instead use the Tridion Semantic AI features and Content Delivery to build taxonomy-based website functionality.
You implement intelligent navigation as follows:
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1. Create Categories and Keywords
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In the Content Manager, you can define your own taxonomies with Categories and Keywords. These taxonomies can then provide a classification scheme that defines a knowledge map of your content domain:
- A Category is a general classification defining the root of a taxonomy. The taxonomy itself is constructed from a nested hierarchy of Keywords defined in a tree structure (your "knowledge map").
- A Keyword defines a value within the taxonomy hierarchy.
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2. Classify content
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When you have created your taxonomies users can classify content and apply metadata. Classifying, or tagging your content with Keywords applies the knowledge map to your content to define how content is related.
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Classifying content requires that you have defined Schemas for Components that include Content fields and Metadata fields that are based on Categories and thus will include the Keywords as list field values. When content authors create Components using these Schemas, they can then tag content with Keywords. (Note that you can also bulk classify content.)
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3. Publish taxonomies
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When you publish taxonomies you can use them on the Presentation Server to implement Intelligent Navigation in your websites.
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A taxonomy published by the Content Management System and presented to the Content Delivery System consists of a hierarchy of Keywords. For every request made through the Taxonomy API, the taxonomy tree data is processed and transformed into an in-memory taxonomy structure consisting of Keywords.
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4. Implement Intelligent Navigation
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You implement Intelligent Navigation on Content Delivery as follows:
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- Add the
<tridion:TaxonomyControl> to your JSPs or ASPXs. The taxonomy control allows you to display a taxonomy and exposes properties to control how a taxonomy is displayed.
- Use the Content Delivery Taxonomy API to retrieve taxonomy trees, get related content based on Keywords or metadata, and filter content.
- Use the Content Delivery Query API for fine-grained control over retrieving content including taxonomic relationships (related content) and over the filtering and sorting of content.
This section focuses on this final step performed on the Content Delivery side. For information on the other steps that you do in Content Manager, refer to the related topics.