Knowledge Organization, Metadata, and Taxonomy
This section covers Knowledge Organization, Metadata, and Taxonomy. The exam tests controlled vocabularies, taxonomy structure, metadata schemas, facets, and terminology governance. A taxonomy supports findability, compliance, and analytics; poor terms fragment reporting.
Core rules
- A taxonomy is a controlled hierarchy of preferred terms with relationships. A folksonomy is user-generated tagging; it can inform design but does not replace control.
- Use preferred labels, alternative labels, broader and narrower relationships, and related links. SKOS is a standard model for such vocabularies.
- Facets are orthogonal dimensions such as audience, process, region, or document type. Do not bury facets inside one deep hierarchy.
- Metadata types include descriptive, structural, administrative, and preservation metadata. Dublin Core is a simple descriptive baseline; domain schemas add specificity.
- Governance assigns term owners, change requests, deprecation rules, and migration planning. Terms must reflect user language and business meaning.
Worked example
Staff use remote work, telework, and hybrid work inconsistently. The reasoning should choose a preferred term, record the others as alternative labels, place the concept under work arrangements, and add facets for policy type and region. Migration maps old tags to the preferred term and retains aliases for search.
Traps
Do not call uncontrolled tags a taxonomy. Do not create excessive depth or one-off categories. Do not allow duplicate concepts with different labels. Do not launch a vocabulary without ownership or maintenance.