What’s a taxonomy?

Taxonomy describes a system of items

A taxonomy is a classification of items. For example, biologists use taxonomies to classify plants and animals and describe their relationship. A content taxonomy is a hierarchical list of standardized terms that describe the content. The terms should be self-explanatory so it’s obvious what they represent. They can be nested to reflect the structure of what they describe, and they need to be standardized so the items with the same property are always tagged with the same taxonomy term. For instance, you can use the terms business and leisure to tag articles about hotels. The leisure tag may also have nested tags beach-side and city-center to further specify properties of the hotels in the leisure category. It’s important to remember that one item, be it an article or animal, may have assigned multiple taxonomy terms.

Taxonomy structures

A taxonomy is a hierarchy of terms, with the most general ones at the top and the most specific ones at the bottom. Terms in taxonomies have relationships, the names of which are inspired by real-world family relationships. A term under which other terms are is called a parent of those other terms. The terms under a parent are the parent’s children or child terms. And if multiple terms have a common parent and are on the same hierarchy level, they’re called siblings. For example, a company selling merchandise for pets can have the term pet highest in the hierarchy. Its child terms can then be cat and dog. The terms cat and dog would be siblings with a common parent pet.

What does a taxonomy look like in Kontent.ai?