Why would an organization need a taxonomy?

I had to prepare some document introducing taxonomy.


• Where do you store a file that is of interest to you? In which folder?.
• Do you have difficulties deciding upon which folder to store it?
• Do you have difficulties deciding upon the names of the folders and sub-folders ?
• Would you prefer not to have to store manually the file?
• Once you’ve found an interesting website, how do you save its URL?
• How do you retrieve a file you’ve stored several months ago?
• How do you manage your incoming email messages?


The following is a definition of terms used in the field of information :

Taxonomy: Taxonomy is "the science of classification". Usually taxonomy is a top down approach where one person (specialist) defines the categories and everyone else is using this classification.

Folksonomy: A folksonomy is a taxonomy created by people (users). It is used to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photographs, Web links and other web content using open ended labels called tags.

Ontology: An ontology is a shared understanding of some domain of interest. It is a structured information model of a domain capable of supporting reasoning by human users and software agents.

Additional terms
Tag: A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (like picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information it is applied to.

Tagging: describing the content of a web page in one or more simple words (tags). Often known as key words in academic articles.

Thesaurus: A taxonomy that also includes associated and related terms.