Building a Taxonomy
Taxonomies help bind your content together, even across vertical markets.
A taxonomy can be considered the backbone of an online publishing operation. Its hierarchy of keywords define a Web site’s content in ways that enable the publisher to manipulate that content and allows visitors to easily find it and locate more.
“Our taxonomy is one piece of a program that we put in place to standardize the structure of all of our data and the types of descriptors around our data,” says Dave Dunbar, director of product development at Reed Business Information U.S. “In addition to topics, we also have categories on what type of content it is—blog post, video, slide show, event, and so on.”
Yet for publishers, like RBI, that have brands spanning a variety of markets, developing a taxonomy that addresses vertical niches and leverages horizontal commonalities can be the most effective. In RBI’s case, there are verticals that Dunbar has stitched together horizontally. “We’ve identified what we call horizontal taxonomies. These are taxonomies that are standard across different niches and industries,” he says. “Business events, M&A, and supply chains are examples of what just about every industry tracks. We have terms that can knit our content across brands.”
There are two significant benefits that come out of taxonomies. The descriptive data helps standardize the content, corralling it into a framework that enables repurposing on a large scale. “It significantly reduces our time to market for deploying new functionality,” says Dunbar. “I could build a module that pulls in related content and because all of our magazine data is stored in a common standard, we can build it once and deploy it across our sites at once.”
These modules can pull specific content from the various, otherwise unrelated, verticals that has a predictable behavior and “won’t break,” says Dunbar.
A second benefit is the taxonomies provide editors with readership analytics. “Every piece of content in our system has a unique ID and record. Associated with that record are all the different descriptions for that content. I can see we served X article impressions and of those impressions here are the occurrences of the different taxonomy IDs and how many impressions we had.”
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