Tom Smith has a nice introduction to the topic of taxonomies and thesauruses in Why you need your very own taxonomy. To quote:
It's often easy to forget that better maths, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, fuzzy logic, and neural nets, may never work out that "Bubble & Squeak" has nothing to do with bubbles or squeaking. But people can make these connections and structures easily. One way to help your search engine to locate "better" matches is to add a little common-sense humanity and create a taxonomy.
Posted by Karl
March 19, 2003 08:57 AM