 Good afternoon. Welcome to taxonomies, categories, and tags. I'm Heather Heddon. I'm a taxonomist, not a taxidermist. I've been doing taxonomies for a long time, about 22 years, both employed and self-employed. And I've developed my own, created my own WordPress website. So my experience with WordPress is a little bit more limited, but I've experimented with taxonomies and categories and tags there. About my background, as I had my introduction slide, in addition to my own business, head in information management with taxonomy consulting and previously indexing, I am employed as a senior vocabulary editor. That means controlled vocabulary, like taxonomies at Gail, a Cengage company. Cengage is here in Boston. I live in a Boston area. I also teach an online course in creating taxonomies. I'd originally done it through Simmons College School of Library Information Science Continuing Education Program, but they discontinued their continuing education program, so I offer it on my own. And perhaps my greatest claim to fame in the taxonomy world is that I wrote this book, The Accidental Taxonomist, which is already in its second edition. And so let's get started. This is my outline. We'll talk with just a little bit about categories and tags at the beginning, because I'm sure we all have some familiarity with that. And then I'm going to step back and talk more about taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, what they are, my area of expertise. And then we'll go back and look at taxonomies, categories, and tags in WordPress, and then finally my recommendations of best practices for creating taxonomies. So I think we're all somewhat familiar with the usage of categories and tags. Actually, I'd like to ask for a show of hands. How many people have assigned categories to posts in WordPress? Yeah, almost everybody. How many of you have created those categories in the first place, as opposed to using what someone else created? Still most of you, good. And how many of you have assigned tags to posts in WordPress? Many of you. And how many have done, and I assume then some of you have done both. So we're familiar with categories, even before you came to WordPress, probably as virtual folders in your desktop, maybe an email and they could be nested. We're familiar with tags, such as hashtags on social media or tags on image or photo sharing sites. I've looked a little further. You can see them here on email. This is in Outlook. They have categories for set up for color coded and in Gmail. There are also categories. So they're all over the place. Often they're separate, either categories or tags, but sometimes in the same application, in addition to WordPress, you'll see both. This first screenshot is from the content management system, Al Fresco. There are categories in tags. Another online service I've been doing consulting for, Pick Monkey, has both categories and tags. And even this PowerPoint presentation in my Microsoft soft office, which I have not used the properties for, it has category and keywords, which means tags. And as we see in WordPress dashboard for posts, there are categories and tags. And then in different columns, you can see categories and tags. And then on the resulting posts, you see both categories and tags, the categories with the folder symbol and the tags with the tag symbol. So I think most of you are familiar with that. But let's think about the differences, whether for WordPress or even more in general. How are they distinct? You think of categories as maybe being buckets that content goes into. So how we categorize, we put a post here or here or here. Tags are topics that are in the content, in the post. So it's sort of conceptually thinking of it in a different way. A set of categories can be analogous to a table of contents, because you have these main chapters. Whereas tags are like the back of the book index, I said I've done indexing, which are more specific. So categories are pretty broad. And as I said, tags are more specific. Consequently, categories tend to be more limited in number. And this can really vary. I mean, you could have as few as three, such as categories for news, events, resources, very broad. Or you could go quite a bit further. Whereas tags are much more numerous. So it's relative here. Categories are often mutually exclusive. That doesn't mean that the same post cannot get more than one category. But their intention is to be quite exclusive. Where tags can, although they are distinct in their meaning, each one, there can be some overlap. Now, here's a difference is that categories can be put into hierarchies where tags can be unstructured. I'll get into that some more. And categories are more controlled, where tags are less controlled. And as such, categories are preplanned. You decide what the categories are before you start posting. Whereas tags are added as needed. Now, this other difference is not necessarily in WordCast, but it's from my experience overall. That categories support browsing and tags support searching. Anyway, these slides are up on my website. I hope you saw that before. So you don't need to take pictures of everything. They're already on my website. Okay, so stepping back to taxonomies and control vocabularies and introduction in general. Let's look at some definitions of taxonomy. Now, WordCast has its own definitions as a grouping mechanism that comprises a set of terms. And they can be categories or tags. And there's some others too. But let's step back historically where the root of the word taxonomy from the Greek, taxis, which means arrangement, and nomia, which means method. So that is the idea. It's an arrangement method. So whether tags are really a taxonomy is questionable. Probably best known is the Linnaean classification for organisms, animals, and plants. You think of kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, species. That's your classic taxonomy. But taxonomy is now used, of course, in all kinds of information management. But traditionally, and typically it is a hierarchical arrangement, broader, narrower parent-child going several levels. But we also hear the word taxonomy, meaning any kind of control vocabulary of terms so it can include categories or tags that are unstructured. So control vocabulary, what's that? That's something broader than a taxonomy. But it's an authoritative restricted list of terms that words or phrases use mainly in indexing or tagging to support retrieval. But it is controlled, and that's important. So maybe uncontrolled tags are not a controlled vocabulary. It's controlled in who and when new terms or new categories can be added. And this doesn't miss it could be systematic, more likely it's a policy, an editorial policy that makes this control. Now, it's quite broad. Control vocabulary doesn't have to have hierarchy in it. It doesn't have to have synonyms. It could be any just list of terms. So a set of categories is a control vocabulary. A set of tags may or may not be a control vocabulary. So let's look at different kinds of control vocabularies from the simplest to the most complex. You can have a simple list. You sometimes call a pick list of terms that maybe aren't a drop down box. Something called a synonym ring or a synonym set or a search for the sore I this or as plural for sore I those are the terms are not displayed to the user but they support search. So if a user enters in a term, it matches against the others in the set of synonyms for the same concept and will retrieve content that was tagged with it. The name authority file means this means a proper noun, names of people, organizations, agencies, companies, places where there would be synonyms or variants and maybe other information but there isn't necessarily a hierarchy or relationship between them. And taxonomies and its more narrow sense are have this structure. They are hierarchical and then there's other variation called faceted and I'll give some examples of that getting a little more complex or this or I plural of the source and they're actually there. They're actually standards for that from ISO and nice. So nice. So is the National Information Standards Organization. They have broader and narrower term relationships but also associated or related term. I mean see also relationships and they have the synonyms which they call non preferred terms. There are more rules and structures about them. And then ontologies get even more complex because the relationships between the terms can be semantic. You can designate different kinds of meanings for the relationships. So that's kind of beyond us for now. Okay, so I have example focusing on taxonomy. We have example here on the left of a hierarchical taxonomy and the typical way to display it is to have the narrower terms or child terms indented under the broader term or parent term. A faceted taxonomy on the right. I created this example. This could be for a job search website where different kinds of job postings are categorized in different ways. Career level function industry. So in a sense that there is a little bit of a hierarchy here too but not the same way as the traditional hierarchical taxonomy. So just to review the different kinds of control vocabularies from simplest to most complex with their different features. The ambiguity control means that there's only a single concept that the user sees. The synonym control means that they're in addition, they're a limited number of synonyms that point to that preferred term, the concept. A taxonomy is defined as one with hierarchical relationships. I put synonym control in parentheses because it's optional. If it gets very large that can be helpful. And then the Saurus also has the associative relationships and the synonym control and the anthology has semantic relationships and concepts grouped by classes. So a taxonomy or control vocabulary, what's it good for? Maybe that's intuitive, but it's good to review that. It enables visitors to find content on a selected topic, whether they are thinking it up or choosing it from a list. And it's definitely more accurate this way than search alone. I think we've all encountered that when we just use the default search on a site that we're not getting results that we feel satisfied with. We don't feel that we're missing things or we're getting obscure things that don't really belong. But it also enables visitors to explore related topics and related content because if the items have those tags on it, they can then explore what else is tagged with this. I'll show an example. And as such, then it enhances the user experience and user engagement because they can then explore what else is in this topic. Oh, I'm interested in this topic that's related. And we want that, of course. On the back end, taxonomy support better organization and management of content. And I've certainly looked through my large list of blog posts by looking them up by, by their categories to see what else have I posted on this. Finally, but quite important is that taxonomies can enhance SEO, search engine optimization. And that's the kind of a whole nother topic area, but they do help. But that's not their main purpose. And I just learned in a session or this morning that categories and tags in WordPress can also be used by visitors to subscribe to RSS feeds that I didn't know about that. So let's look more about taxonies, categories and tags in WordPress. WordPress defines not merely category and tag, but also something called link, link category and post format. They all these are therefore official taxonomies that are default in WordPress. I'm focusing on the first two. The others are not quite as common in your default simple sites. There's also the option to create custom taxonomies in WordPress. This can be done with developer coding or with plugins. I haven't done it, but there is a reason for that. Because if you use the default categories or tags, you have only one set of categories and one set of tags, and you might want additional sets, especially if it's something that's going to be faceted and you want to have the different aspects to filter by. So the categories and tags in WordPress, what are their similarities? They both are used for posts and not for pages. And at first time I thought, oh, well, I might want them for pages, too. But when you come to think about it, it really is the posts that most benefit from it. They don't have to be blog posts, but whatever is in the format of posts. There is, of course, a plugin called post tags and categories for pages. So if you feel that you want to have categories or tags assigned to your pages, you may use that. Both categories and tags are displayed on individual posts. And then from there, you can then hyperlink to a list or archive page of all the posts that share the same category or the same tag. Both can be generated into tag clouds. Now, even though it's called a tag cloud, you can create a category cloud. And this is default, too. I mean, there's this little drop down in there where you can go from tags to categories. And then multiple categories or multiple posts can be assigned, tags can be assigned to a post, even if the best practice is to use fewer categories. As far as the default site search, I even tried to experiment this myself to see if categories or tags helped the retrieval results on a certain topic. And they both didn't really seem to make that much difference. And they didn't seem to be any different between each other. And then for web search, for SEO, it also doesn't make much difference, whether it's a category or a tag. I've read some up on this and we haven't found any differences. I mean, intuitively, there might be a slight difference because the category can appear in the URL. But aside from that, it doesn't make much of a difference. So just to show some, here's a tag cloud from my website, but then I did a category cloud too. And because my categories and tags aren't very well organized yet. The topic of tags on me type things should have shown up in tags, but I had to sign them to categories. So like I said, you need to, if you decide you want to display the widget for a tag cloud or use it as a category cloud, check it out first and then see maybe you need to adapt your categories or tags so it really is useful and you want them where you want. Otherwise, I've got half of them in tags and half of them in categories. And these two screenshots show the what happens when you select the category or tag that's at the bottom of the post to see the others. Then you get to this page that lists all the category of the name of my category was called taxonomy terms. And the name of my tag was called WordPress taxonomies and so that shows up there and you can see it's also in my breadcrumb trail which I have in this theme. All right, we talked about the similarities of categories and tags in WordPress. So what about the differences? All right, categories are required and if you don't assign a category, you get uncategorized as the name of the category which doesn't look very nice. Tags are not required and nothing happens if you don't use them. Categories can be put into hierarchies by signing what's called a parent and you cannot do this with tags. Categories are also alphabetically displayed and can be browsed by the visitor if you just put that widget on your page. Tags cannot, although there is a plugin to do that if you want the list of tags displayed on your page. So that's not a big difference. On the dashboard you can filter your list of posts by categories but you cannot do that by tags. So this is your back end that's managing your content. What might be significant is that the label, the name of a category does appear in the post URL and the tag does not. And of course if you have more than one category, I haven't even figured out which one, one of them gets assigned to the URL. I don't know why, how they decide which one. And if you have a theme with the breadcrumb trail then that will also appear in the breadcrumb trail. So here is an example of a category that the name of the category is called taxonomy terms. It shows up in my URL and it shows up in my breadcrumb trail. It was a two-word term and so a hyphen got automatically put in which is nice. So as we've seen there are actually more similarities than differences to categories and tags and WordPress as it's set up. So the differences aren't so much what you can do but what you choose to do. And so what you should do is create your own taxonomy policy, what kind of guidelines for your users, those who are posting and tagging or categorizing posts, how they should do it. So I would recommend making the categories a quite controlled vocabulary is determined ahead of time and if somebody wants to add a new category to a new post although WordPress permits it they need to check with with you or somebody else before they do that so it doesn't get out of control. Whereas you can decide well tags should be that should be available or we can always create a new tag for a new post because a new post will have some new topic in there. Also part of your policy could be to limit the number of categories or tags that can be assigned to a post. Depending on how you set up your categories if you have a very small number like three or four then you may say only assign one category or if you have more of them may say only assign one or two. And tags it's also a good idea to set a limit because some people might just get carried away and think well more people will find it more visitors will find it if I sign more and more and more tags. Of course if those of you know anything about SEO you can get penalized with having too much. But it's just not useful. I mean they don't users want to know what if there's some substantial information. The category is what for the whole post what is it as a whole. What's the main idea. What category does it belong into. What is it. Whereas tags are what's discussed in it but you want quite a bit of content in there not a mere passing mentioned. So again think of categories as providing or organization of topics and tags and supplementing with more additional more specific topics that can change. So here I just been showing from the dashboard the distinction what you see when you want to create a new tag. And what versus creating a new category the only difference by default is the ability to assign a parent category. This is the broader term and you click if you have categories you get a list I have maybe too many categories here. So I can pick when I create one do I want to create it under as a child or as a narrower to a broader one. You see my list here. This one tax on me maintenance is indented under tax on me governments. I had already made that a hierarchical relationship. As you see I don't have much hierarchy here. Which may be I don't know I did a little bit. Sometimes people have a nice hierarchy with a few top terms and then more next level and more next level. OK so that if now that you've attended this and you got a better idea of the difference between how you want to utilize tax on these and tags and you go back to your site or sites and realize Oh those categories should have been tags or maybe some tags should be categories. You can convert them. And my story is that I had created a blog. Well I had a website that was not WordPress because I started it back in 2004. And then I started a blog and something like 2012 on blogger.com. And then I created migrated my website over to WordPress which of course has a great feature for blogs. So then I imported my blog from blogger.com over to WordPress. But blogger.com does not have the distinction between categories and tags. It just has one thing categories or labels whatever. So I assigned lots of categories. I was using it like tags. And then when I imported it over into WordPress those got converted into WordPress categories. And that's why I have so many categories. And then I realized oh well I have the ability to create tags now some of these should be tax. So then I did get this plug into a WordPress categories and tag converter. And then started converting some of my categories into tags. And I'm still sort of in the process of that. So what happens here in the back end we have tags and you look at the list bulk actions. Then there's this new action convert to categories and you can select individual ones and we'll just change these tags to categories or from the category page. You can select convert to tax. Okay faceted tax on me is I've mentioned these are pretty cool. They essentially it's a multiple category sets or tax on me or facets multiple ones that are used in combination. So posts or other content items then get categorized in multiple ways. Maybe one term or more than one from each of the different facets. Each facet represents a different aspect. Now here's an example location can be a facet product type market owner. We often see these in e-commerce sites that are very large and have lots of products that need to be categorized by different aspects such as color or size or price range or other depending on what it is other categories of types. So the visitor comes and selects a combination of terms from different facets to filter or limit or refine. Those are think of those words filter limit refine that's what facets enable you to do. So faceted tax on these can be created in WordPress but this is not something default either with developer coding and there are lots of plugins for it. I just show some examples here. These one premium plug in is called facet WP and from their website I saw these examples that had been created with it. The first is for cars of course where you have a facet for make driven wheels price. The next one is for recipes we have meal type and cooking style and the third one is for women's clothing and there are different types of clothing brand color. Well I have gender here already. Okay size price. What's interesting you see you get some other little features with this like the color picker and under make for automobile. The boxes indicate that the user may select more than one at a time otherwise the same with recipes otherwise it's one only. Then synonyms. I'm going to talk about them a little bit more in general it's not again something that's default but if your tax on me set is very large too large to be browsed or brows easily it allows people to then find the desired term and this could be useful for tags. There are several wordpress plugins that support the creation of synonyms but these are actually plugins that are supporting search. So if you're looking for plugins to support synonyms you'll find that many of them are actually considered search plugins. Okay so finally tax on me creation best practices. I'm going to talk a little bit about the labels the names of the terms the categories are tagged. How to construct good hierarchies and some more about synonyms. Okay so the term format and style. This when I'm using term that mean can be either a category or a tag. I should choose consistent capitalization. So it could be all lowercase although more often we see initial capitalization but don't use title caps because then people start confusing generic topics with proper nouns. In my example here so that corporate finance the first with the initial cap or all lower cap but not the third example. The terms could be single words or multiword phrases and the usual way is to have them as nouns or noun phrases. These are concepts things ideas. Adjectives alone. Could be terms and special circumstances where the noun is obvious from the context and this could be of course in a facet. But otherwise I would recommend avoiding that avoiding adjectives or verbs. Then there's the issue of plural versus singular. The traditional best practice is to use plural because the idea is if you select this category or tag you will get multiple results with it. So definitely for categories. I've sometimes seen tags in singular and maybe if you have a way of predicting your user behavior are they typically going to name this in a singular then it may be okay. Avoid term inversions noun comma adjective. If we think about tags being like index terms at the back of the book you might start thinking that way but see the back of the book is print. And the user is looking through the list of index terms alphabetically and not searching so then the inversion can be helpful but we certainly don't need it in the digital environment where they're even without a sophisticated search. Users can find a term. Then term creation tips. Okay the term should be unambiguous it's important to understand that these represent concepts they are not just words. So some examples of some terms that could be ambiguous like licenses or examinations then you would you should add another word to it maybe an adjective or in front or occasionally a modifier and parentheses afterwards. The term should be concise because users are browsing and see they want to quickly skim and scan they don't want something very long. So if you can shorten them that would be great. An example here is I was creating a term that was about employee discipline policies but I don't really need that extra word policies on it because there are nothing else about employee discipline there anyway. And then if there's an issue to try to start off with a strong key word because there may be an alphabetical arrangement to browse through. So an example would be to have the term called decision making not making decisions it means the same thing but in terms that starts off with the word making is kind of weak. And also consider the language of your audience when you're trying to choose between two variations of the same concept will your users tend to call these movies or motion pictures. Okay hierarchies structuring a hierarchical relationship. We the formal designation is broader term or narrow term but you might think of it as parent or child term. The way to think of it is that all of the child term fits into the parent term and all and some of a parent term is a child term. So I think if you can see this with the oranges and fruits the arrow going down some fruits are oranges and then the arrow going up on the right all oranges are fruits. And it has to be that way in all cases. All right there's kind of three variations on this hierarchical relationship this generic specific as I shown you the most common generic and a named entity that's a variation like the common noun proper noun and then the whole part. So generic specific is when you have a category of class and it's members or more specific types and a child you if you put it into the sentence is up or is a kind of parent term and then you've got it right or plural than are. So puppies are dogs and investment services is a kind of financial service. Italian is a romance language that that's that's your way of validating. Then a variation is of course a named entity and it's it's class or type which is pretty simple. And then the whole part where the child term is in the parent term and not be taken out. So geographic places that works well. An atomical system stomach is in the gastrointestinal system and organizational bodies like United Nations General Assembly is in the United Nations. Sometimes a term may logically have two parent have two parent terms like online banking as a parent of banking and the parent of online services. We tax on this call this poly hierarchy. So it would appear that online banking is repeated under more than one parent but it is the same term the same concept and it's linked to the same content the same post in both cases. Okay. And then synonyms. These are synonyms and that we also call them variants or alternative labels or non preferred terms like all these synonyms for synonyms. What's important is it's approximately synonymous words or phrases and a synonym just means a word you know that refer to it equivalent concept or the context of the taxonomy and the content. So it's very context oriented. So what works as a synonym in on one site for one set of content will not necessarily work somewhere else. And so the purpose is to capture different wordings of how different people might describe or look up the concept and these could be the differences between the author the person who's writing the blog post or article and the reader the user they might have different ideas how they name the same thing and then different users or visitors also have different ideas how they name things. As I mentioned before it's a taxonomy where you cannot easily be proud. So this may work with tags where you don't have a list or it's just too long to put all put it on one page and browse. And they serve as multiple entry points and they also enable consistent indexing or tagging. So if somebody else that comes along later to tag something they will use the same type of posts. They aren't just synonyms there are many different kinds here. They can be variations or acronyms spelled out. It really depends on the context. And finally my guidelines for synonyms. So a concept may have any number not just one they could have multiple synonyms or it may have none it may not need any. A synonym points to only one preferred term one concept not multiple. Synonyms are displayed on the back end to the person who's doing the tagging and they may or may not actually be displayed to the end user but they will be redirected. And synonyms should follow the same editorial style you've established for the preferred labels. And I think that's it I just have some resources here on taxonomies which are all from my website. But my book my online course and this presentation and others I've given over many years on taxonomies are also on my website and had lists of some published articles and then there's my blog which is in two locations as you see. So I can take questions. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. There is a microphone to come up to. I don't hear the microphone working now. Yes. Yes. Okay. The question is if there are existing templates of you know lists of terms categories or tags and there are two. I'm sorry. I don't have them here on my presentation. One is called tax on me warehouse is one word tax on the warehouse dot com. It includes other things like glossaries and it's not quite up to date now. They need to keep it up to date. Another is bar talk that's B. A. R. T. O. C. which stands for the Basel Registry of terminal I know terminologies ontologies. I can't remember the whole acronym also dot word. It's in Basel, Switzerland. The librarian there has gathered lots of especially open source of freely available controls vocabulary lists. Some of them are quite short and it really depends on your situation. I mean if you have something that's kind of generic or standard it could be but if you have some kind of unique collection of article posts it's better to create your own customized set of categories and term tags. Any other questions? We still have just maybe two more minutes. Okay. And again this presentation is listed on my website in addition to others. Thank you for coming.