Taxonomies in Operation, Design, and Meta-Design

Taxonomies are a well-established instrument for organizing and accessing resources in Information, Content and Knowledge Management (ICKM) systems. Furthermore, they contribute to a common understanding and an improved communication in the user community by fostering the development and usage of a shared vocabulary. In addition to these operational usage scenarios, we argue in this paper that a taxonomy is also a valuable medium in system design. We present a meta-design framework for systematically supporting the user in the setup, customization and evolution of We-based ICKM system instances, which is based on a model-based domain construction approach. Taxonomies are exploited both as the fundamental basis for the construction process itself and as the principal support for contextdriven access to the common metamodel in this framework implementing the ontological commitment underlying the complete framework. These manifold forms of taxonomy exploitation are supported by a flexible taxonomy component that enables multiple classifications of arbitrary resources, effective taxonomy management, and context-adaptive taxonomy reduction in our ICKM meta-design framework.