Clarify major concepts? (noob)

[muhamadtood]

Hi, I'm running OpenKM for evaluation and I really like what I see.

It seems English is not the first language of major contributors. To me the concepts of Taxonomy, Categories, Metadata, and Thesaurus are a bit different from what one would expect from these English words in general use.

Could someone describe the main idea and purpose of those concepts, especially the differences between them? What makes one choose Taxonomy instead of Categories or Metadata, for example? Thanks very much, the User Guide is very brief in this respect.
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That's the question. On a side note I'm all for this way of creating a multidimensional structure. Most other systems begin by taking a hierarchy for granted. "The Universe is hierarchical, you know," they seem to say. No, it's definitely not. In the real world things have more than one facet, get mixed up, transform from one appearance to another, sometimes for good reasons, at other times for silly reasons. They remain reality and must be managed.

[jllort]

Taxonomy is a scientific term, used for example in biology to classify species, etc... Also, used by the librarian in the classification process ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy ).

Consider taxonomy as a shelf, there is where really data is stored and taxonomy is a hierarchy to classify it.

Metadata are attributes of the documents. In case of a closed list of metadata values - select - we allow navigation across these terms ( in case free text like input, obviously is not allowed ). Metadata three are really query results based on metadata values shown in the desktop.

Categories are like building additional taxonomy. Documents are stored into taxonomy but categories allow complementary navigation.

The most important thing for us is getting a description of the problem you want to solve. Not necessary a detailed one, only a general idea. How do you recover information currently in the real world, what amount of data you manage, what types, and how do you like to recover information ( usually metadata values assigned to document, for example, an invoice should have the invoice number, dates etc.. )