A taxonomy can provide many benefits related to organizing information and making it easier to find, but how to come up with a taxonomy can be an obstacle to its implementation. A good taxonomy cannot be fully generated automatically, and, in most cases, a pre-built taxonomy is not suitable. Manual effort is needed to design and build an appropriate taxonomy.

A taxonomy is a kind of controlled vocabulary. A controlled vocabulary is a set of terms (words or phrases) that represent unique concepts, things, or ideas. The terms can serve as tags when they are tagged to content items (documents, web pages, database records, images or other multimedia files). A taxonomy is a specific kind of controlled vocabulary that has structure. This can either be a hierarchical tree structure or a faceted structure, which organizes terms by attribute type to serve as search filters or refinements. Automatic methods can generate lists of terms, but they cannot create the logical structure.

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