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Taxonomies have long played a central role in both medical and library science for the classification of medical terms and books. Recently, the U.S. federal government’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) Data Reference Model (DRM). The FEA DRM specifies three abstract layers of an organization’s information: business context, information exchange, and data element description. Business context specifies the use of a taxonomy to categorize government information. One definition of a taxonomy is “a scheme that partitions a body of knowledge and defines the relationships among the pieces. It is used for classifying and understanding the body of knowledge.”

For federal agencies trying to learn how to implement taxonomies, most examples in portals and on public websites are informal taxonomies where neither the nodes nor the associations between them are formally defined. Examples of such taxonomies can be found on yahoo.com, froogle.com, and dmoz.org. Such informal taxonomies are only useful for browsing and not for automated techniques like query expansion, rule execution, taxonomy integration, faceted classification, and inference. This article will examine the requirements of formal taxonomies and provide examples of each construct.

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