Taxonomy Connector

The Taxonomy Connector exposes thesauri and taxonomies from Taxonomy Space as external taxonomies in Tridion Sites. Taxonomy Space is included with Tridion Semantic AI, an optional the optional feature package.

Introduction

In Content Manager, Tridion Semantic AI and it's Smart Tagging feature enables users to get can automatic suggestions for classification of content. On the Content Delivery side, Tridion Semantic AI makes it possible to build rich search functionality in your website.

Supported capabilities

The Taxonomy Connector provides the following key capabilities:
Structure
Retrieves a specified portion of a hierarchy all in one call, including many-to-many relationships between entities.
You can use this capability to retrieve the following:
  • An entire taxonomy
  • A specific subtree in the taxonomy
  • Only the direct children of a given concept
  • Paths to concepts with all direct children expanded
  • Paths to a concept's direct parents
The capability includes options to support limiting the size of the returned hierarchy and for retrieving multiple subtrees at once.
Extract Concepts
Gets relevant concepts from an external taxonomy based on the external system's analysis of Tridion Sites content. The extraction is specific to the content item's content language.
The capability support two modes of concept extraction and classification:
Individual, semi-automatic
Experience Space users can select the Suggest tags button while editing the item (Components and other items with metadata). If a field has been configured in the Schema for Smart Tagging, the field gets updated to show a list of suggested concepts. The suggestions are based on the item's current content and metadata.
The concepts are sorted according to the relevance to the Tridion Sites content item. Users can then review and modify the suggested concepts before saving the item.
Bulk, fully automatic
Experience Space users (or the API) can choose to analyze and apply taxonomy concepts in bulk mode, that is by selecting multiple Components or other items from the list view and then choosing the Autoclassify option.
Tridion Sites sends the content and metadata for all selected items to the external system. Tridion Sites saves all extracted concepts to each of the item's smart-taggable fields within the field limitations. This mode is fully automatic and users do not analyze the concept tags during the process. Then can, however, still edit individual items and change the tags, if necessary.

Example use cases

These capabilities make it possible to implement the following use cases (among others):

  • Share a common classification design across the whole enterprise where users tag content with concepts from shared taxonomies.
  • Support classification with Smart Tagging where Content Manager users can get concept suggestions or choose fully automated tagging.
  • Provide website users with enhanced search capabilities:
    • semantic search – users get suggestions based on taxonomy concepts and synonyms
    • faceted search – users can dynamically drill down to the most relevant content
  • Improve SEO, maintain brand consistency, and more through consistently classifying all documents, assets and content.
  • Create a mashup of content coming from various sources using a common taxonomy to provide an integrated knowledge experience.

High-level architecture

The following diagram gives a high-level architecture of the connector when used with Tridion Sites: