Simply stated, a taxonomy organizes your site by attaching descriptive terms to each piece of content. These terms might identify a page as belonging to a specific section of your site, or describe which topics a given blog post discusses, or what region of the country an event takes place.
Taxonomies organize terms in separate vocabularies so that, for example, alumni event locations don't get mixed up with campus sites when you're trying to investigate junior-year abroad destinations, or find out which cafeteria is open late.
Setting up these vocabularies, and the descriptive terms that belong to them, is the first step in creating a taxonomy.
CommonSpot supports faceted classification, a branching system that enables searching or navigating along multiple related paths, corresponding to different independent orderings, or facets, of information. For example, an academic program classification might contain facets for Undergraduate, Graduate, and Special Academic Programs.
CommonSpot uses a predefined taxonomy for associating content with selected terms, making it possible to search, navigate, and filter pages based on these criteria.
Before contributors at your site can associate data with terms in a taxonomy, you must create or import a taxonomy definition file. CommonSpot provides an XML-formatted file (commonspot\taxonomy\sample.xml) defining all taxonomy terms and the structure necessary for including term attributes and relationships.
Once you create or import a taxonomy, CommonSpot generates a new field type for associating content with taxonomy terms in Simple Forms, Custom Elements, and Metadata Forms. As contributors develop content associations, terms from the taxonomy become available as search and filter criteria for the Data Sheet, Custom Elements, and other CommonSpot components that use data filtering.
See the overview of CommonSpot's Extensive Metadata Taxonomy Support for a discussion of the benefits of taxonomy-based classification in general, and CommonSpot taxonomy features in particular.
Your site can use more than one taxonomy definition file at a time. For a description of the accepted XML format, see the Taxonomy XML Specification.
Note: You can purchase standard or custom taxonomies based on a particular industry, for example, the news industry.
To access Taxonomy options, expand Content Classification in the left panel of the Site Administration Dashboard and click Taxonomy.
The Manage Taxonomy dialog displays.
Related Links
You can download PDF versions of the Content Contributor's, Administrator's, and Elements Reference documents from the support section of paperthin.com (requires login).
For technical support:
