What's a valuable taxonomy? If you could succinctly summarize the wisdom from the art and science of organizing content into useful filing and retrieval schemes, the answer would to this question would be "it depends." There's no one right way to use taxonomies, but this panel of experts in taxonomy development and deployment came up with some important best practices. From the perspective of Trish Yancey, President & COO of Synapse Corporation
, a valued taxonomy is one that your clients find to be indispensible, small enough to be maintained cost-effectively in the face of ongoing change but broad and deep enough to fit a wide variety of content types. While there are instances in which it may pay to do this from scratch, Synapse's Taxonomy Warehouse provides a clearinghouse for taxonomies that can be used by institutions and publishers to seed their efforts - well worth a visit for database and directory publishers considering how to monetize their own taxonomies. Luke Beatty Director of Corporate Development for WAND Inc. focuses on deploying effective taxonomies for online database and directory publishers serving a wide range of industries, a good taxonomy acts as a good seed for building keyword structures granular enough to support placement of content in search engine ad inventories effectively, effort that can benefit from a close collaboration between a taxonomy expert and the client's product team. For Andy Podolsky, Senior Ontologist for Convera, making taxonomies work effectively in a collaborative environment means working with companies that consume taxonomies to help resolve content from structured and unstructured content sources effectively, an environment that can live comfortably with multiple taxonomies working in parallel to solve content access and management problems. On the other hand, Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca looks at taxonomies not so much as a way to store information but as the core of their multi-faceted navigation structures that adapt to the wanderings of users through a database and present only the relevant options available in a given context. Given their success in enabling ecommerce via majors such as Barnes and Noble and their increasing penetration into intranets, it's an approach to consider carefully when the value of content comes down to hard cash on the table.

Which of these approaches is best? It all depends, of course, but in all of these approaches the common key is to recognize that a useful taxonomy can be one of the most valuable ways to enhace the market value of your own content and can help publishers create more loyalty in institutional markets at a relatively low cost.