Table of Contents
Creating taxonomies
17. June 2025
Table of Contents
What are taxonomies?
A taxonomy is a hierarchically arranged structure of descriptive metadata. Users can navigate and filter the content in their archives using these preset metadata structures. The content of a taxonomy can also be used when entering metadata to ensure vocabulary consistency and avoid misspellings/typos (aka. "controlled vocabulary").
Anyone can use the metadata taxonomies for navigation so long as taxonomy navigation has been enabled for an archive. However, a user needs to be a taxonomy manager to create the actual taxonomy content (see below).
How to set up taxonomies
Creating a taxonomy is a three-step process, as shown below. However, planning the taxonomy is crucial to create content that users will recognize and be able and willing to use. We have, therefore created a checklist for planning taxonomy content that outlines some good practices to this end.
- Enable taxonomies for the specific fields in the metadata field setup in the site configuration.
- Enable taxonomy navigation on the archives(s) of choice.
- Log on to FotoWeb using an account with taxonomy manager privileges and create the taxonomy content. You can define taxonomy content in both the main and pro interfaces.
Learn from a step-by-step guide using a practical example
To help understand how a taxonomy is set up from scratch, a separate topic has been created to explain how you can create a taxonomy that helps users navigate and edit metadata in an archive with a collection of different car models.