Taxonomy-Building Tools: An Investigative Study

Creating topic hierarchies that can be mapped to the source documents provide effective access to the required information. However, the exponential growth in the volume of information may be too overwhelming for manual approach to taxonomy building. Taxonomy software, with automated approach, but minimal human intervention, easy integration with other products, and effective taxonomy maintenance utility provide a practical and efficient solution. Many vendors serving this market segment offer a wide range of approaches and solutions, such as Semio, Autonomy, Verity, Quiver, Inxight, and SmartLogik. The aim of this study is to identify different types of taxonomy-building tools available in the market and study their features and characteristics. The selection criteria was based on the availability of an evaluation copy from the vendor along with detailed information about the products such as product manuals, white papers, and product data sheets. The findings showed that most taxonomy- building tools share common features such as hierarchical structures of the taxonomy (depth of the taxonomy), taxonomy maintenance, multiple taxonomy views (cross-referencing support), import/export utilities, taxonomy presentation and access (access points to the information), and being language independent (multilingual support). The results also revealed that visualization tools, personalization, product integration and industry-specific taxonomies were the value-added features to the taxonomy software.