Metadata, Taxonomies, Vocabularies – Do What?

Imagine standing in front of a wall of cubbies filled with parchment scrolls, and not being able to find the Tractatus you know exists in there.  Or no – make that try to find the right health insurance claim form on your corporate intranet.  Your predicament is as old as civilization itself.  And content classification structures, including tools like metadata and taxonomy, were invented thousands of years ago to deal with it. 

But let’s say you want to build one of these taxonomy or metadata things yourself.  You might first want to figure out what those terms mean – though ironically enough, there are creative differences over how they’re defined and used. Nonetheless, the following offers a high-level description of these key terms.