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Introducing Taxonomy Matters

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This article welcomes a new Abierto al Público series focused on taxonomy as a key element for successful knowledge management. It provides structure, consistency, and promotes common understanding.  A taxonomy is an organization structure that consists of a set of term lists (controlled vocabularies) that are used to classify or tag content (e.g. documents, data, etc.) and enable its retrieval. For example, if you open your favorite music platform and select “Hip-Hop” or “Jazz”, you’ve just used a genre taxonomy to find what you were looking for.

Taxonomy – How do they help?

In the context of knowledge management at the IDB, our knowledge product taxonomy serves several essential use cases.  We use a taxonomy to enable the consistent tagging of knowledge products with relevant concepts to reflect their main focus.  This allows us to provide a description of their attributes, to easily identify relationships between products, and enhance content discoverability.

A meaningful user experience relies on taxonomy for both content creation and consumption. Taxonomy ensures that the attributes of content are labeled with the same terms, leading to consistency across applications and better usability.  Additionally, when aligned with international standards, this increases the scale of understanding a content’s “about-ness” and strengthens interoperability with data aggregators and harvesters.

Taxonomy also serves as a key structural element to support the creation of knowledge graphs, especially when providing context for the relationships between terms within the taxonomy, or across multiple vocabularies, in the form of an ontology.  This provides needed clarity within a knowledge graph by ensuring uniformity and reducing ambiguity.

From an SEO perspective, taxonomy is also incredibly important.  Well-defined and structured tags aid in boosting visibility in search results by helping them understand what content is about and how it relates to other data on the web.  Given the rate at which information is created and shared today, this is more important than ever.  Taxonomy can enhance search performance and discoverability by organizing potential search results into meaningful categories, making it easier for crawlers and users to locate relevant information.

This year we began reviewing our taxonomy from all angles, including our processes, our systems, the content schemas, and the terms themselves, allowing us to chart a course that will modernize and better leverage this powerful aspect of information architecture. 

Defining taxonomy terms

As part of our taxonomy roadmap, we realize that defining all the terms used is a must, and at Abierto al Público we believe that knowledge is most powerful when it is made open and shared widely.  In that spirit, we are pleased to introduce a new article series that will delve deeper into our knowledge organization system: Taxonomy Matters.  Each article will share the definition of a specific term along with a group of knowledge products whose main focus is described by that term. 

The definitions are taken from multiple sources based on the fitness of purpose for the IDB’s specific context.  Some definitions come from established reputable sources, such as the AGROVOC, UNTERM, and EUROVOC controlled vocabularies, as well as the  ILO Thesaurus, and the OECD Economic Glossary.  The source’s selection depends on the domain of the term, and the availability of a trusted definition.

Other definitions come from an IDB document, either directly from the text, or with the help of an advanced feature of our publications catalog that uses artificial intelligence to allow interaction with specific documents.  We’ll explain this process in detail in an upcoming Taxonomy Matters article.

What’s next?

As we continue to modernize our taxonomy and enhance the discoverability of relevant knowledge, we invite you to join us on this journey of fostering an open, trusted, and well-defined knowledge environment.

Stay tuned for upcoming articles that will delve deeper into the terms that drive the IDB’s mission of improving lives forward.

What terms would you define and from what source? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Taxonomy Matters article series

Watch this space for links to the articles as they are published.


Kyle Strand

Kyle Strand is Lead Knowledge Management Specialist and Head of the Felipe Herrera Library in the Knowledge, Innovation and Communication Sector of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). For more than a decade, his work has focused on initiatives to improve access to knowledge both at the Bank and in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Kyle designed the first open repository of knowledge products at the IDB and spearheaded the idea of software as a knowledge product to be reused and adapted for development purposes, which led the IDB to become the first multilateral to formally recognize it as such. Currently, Kyle coordinates library services within the organization, supports the open knowledge product lifecycle including publications and open data, and promotes the use of artificial intelligence and natural language processing as a cornerstone of knowledge management in the digital age. Kyle is also executive editor of Abierto al Público, a blog in Spanish that promotes the opening and reuse of knowledge. He has a B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.A. from the George Washington University.

Maite Arakaki

Maite holds a degree in Library Science and Information Systems from the Universidad del Museo Social Argentino. She has worked as a cataloguing librarian in private and public libraries, as well as a metadata advisor in the private sector. She is interested in semantic technologies and user experience, earning certifications in areas such as Semantic Integration and Design Thinking. Presently, she works as a taxonomist and metadata librarian at the Felipe Herrera Library in the Knowledge and Learning Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (Washington, DC).

Estefanny Pérez Duque

Editor and consultant for the Knowledge and Learning Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Ecuadorian, passionate about political science, international relations, and knowledge management. Bringing a rich academic background to her work, she holds a Master's degree in Latin American Studies with a focus on gender and development from Ohio University. Prior starting at the IDB, she contributed to the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab and at the Council of the Americas where she promoted programs related to public and private investment in the region. These initiatives targeted priority areas such as healthcare, innovation, and digital transformation.

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