Clarify major concepts? (noob)

[sodastream]

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]

Version 7 will be a great change between actual way of doing things, but is still on beta stage and only few customers have access to it. Basically it works with a file plan which automatically catalogs documents and records and take control on entire life cycle ( rules etc. ).

About your questions: taxonomy is a term from biology ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxon ) understanding the term you will understanding the philosophy on it. All the nodes are stored into the taxonomy ( this is the hard structure ). Metadata is a group of extra information, data about data, which enrich the node contents. From metadata view you can navigate across taxonomy ( when thinking on taxonomy, consider like a folders into your file system, a hard link meanwhile metadata should be soft links across a complementary folder structure). In the same way consider categories, like a way for navigating across the nodes.

Finally, this these views are coming from standard OpenKM UI features, but obviously "default configurations" not always covers the user need. For it we have recently released a full configurable frontend named kcenter ( Knowledge Center ), where you can enrich, customize etc... the frontend for your needs ( kcenter actually is only available for customers ). For example http://docs.openkm.com/ is a configured kcenter for storing documentation in a more decent look and feel and better usability ( we are on process of migrating all community documentation in new format, actually there's a big messi in our wiki documentation, in advance, apologies for it ). Behing kcenter there's is an standard OpenKM.

[sodastream]

Great, thanks very much for taking the time. I needed especially that bit about taxonomy.