Taxonomy

Pub07

Can someone give me an explanation of what taxonomy is and of what benefit it is to a website? I can see it's to do with categorization but I'm not really sure what the actual use of it is.

Is it only necessary/useful for certain types of sites with lots of varied content like a news site or should it be incorporated into every site?

CuLT

Definition of Taxonomy on Wikipedia.

It refers to classification systems. A nearby example would the boards.ie menu, where topics are organized into hierarchical categories. Taxonomical rules (informally in our case) help define where new forums go, etc.

If you're building an application that will be dealing with large quantities of data, taxonomies and ontologies are metadata which help to define that data, thus making it navigable.

pauldiv

Drupal can make much use of taxonomy:

http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy

mneylon

It also helps with SEO, as you can "pull" people and search engines deeper into your site's archives (depending on how you implement it obviously)

For example:
http://www.coolsites.ie/2008/11/boardsie-irelands-biggest-forum.html

The "related entries" are generated based on the "tags" on the articles, so you get multiple levels of organisation / navigation as well