can tags be replacement of taxonomy?

My Question is around usability. In most of the sites i have seen and developed i see taxonomy as a way a user would find something he开发者_JAVA百科 is looking for in the site. But quite recently i have seen the concept of tagging. Where products services questions are tagged and can be found with the tagname. Is tagging an alternative to taxonomy or they should work together.

I'd say that like most things, it depends on what kind of information you're trying to organize.

For example, here on Stack Overflow, there isn't really a rigid hierarchy by which to sort the questions. They're much more organic in the sense that they can span multiple, and even unrelated, disciplines or fields and create a whole host of dynamic connections. For organizing this type of information, I think tags are an appropriate replacement for traditional, hierarchical taxonification. The decentralized, dehierarchized nature of tagging dovetails perfectly with the general organization of the site's content, especially when the site's users/community is encouraged to participate in cataloguing and organizing the information. Many blogs and social networking sites like Delicious organize their content with a series of tags as well.

Conversely, if you're trying to sell products or provide technical support, you'll probably find that tagging is not a suitable replacement for traditional taxonomic organization. If you're familiar with MSDN, which provides online documentation for developers in the Microsoft ecosystem, you'll observe that most of its content is organized into a natural hierarchy by technology/language, feature, sub-feature, etc. If you want to buy a computer from Dell, you start by narrowing down your choices: do you want a desktop, notebook, or tablet? Do you want a performance-oriented notebook, a desktop-replacement notebook, or an ultra-portable? Etc. Of course, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't consider implementing tags as an alternative way for users to explore the information that you have available, but in the best of cases, they will work together.

Think about the type of content you plan to host on your site and consider the most natural way to organize that information. Your users will appreciate more than anything a site that is intuitive and where they feel it is easy to locate exactly what they're looking for.

That is an argument I always found interesting, and basically I reduce to this question:

In order to found something, is better to have a hierarchical taxonomy or a flat tag-based taxonomy (maybe collaborative i.e. Folksonomy) ?

Well, there's no unique answer, but, depending on the search context, sometimes the former is more convenient and sometimes the latter is.

The best thing would be to have both kind of taxonomies, but could be difficult to manage, in particular if contents are created by people and so the classification is up to them.

One solution could be have tags inheritance, like in drupal taxonomy system.

So for instance when you want to classify a picture of your dog, you just have to select the tag: 'dogs' and automatically your picture will belong to tags: 'dogs' --> 'animals' --> 'living beings' and so on.

This question is an issue related to the human thinking:

Sure it is better, if you can find something by a tagged word. If you dont know the word/tag perfectly, you are not able to find it. Others may have taged the thing you search for with a similar, but other tag. In this case a (binary) tag search will not give you the correct (or whole) awnser.

Anyway, there is a possibility to extract a taxonomy (as long as words/tags are related) out of tags. This concept (combined with a vecor-orientated-search) can be presented to the user and will help him to find what he needs.

Although I'd just upvote Cody's answer (I did), I would also like to add something:

The field of usability used to be within the realm of ergonomics before it grew up. So I think it is appropriate to refer to one of ergonomics' core principles.

Every person has a unique set of dimensions, so there is no single set of “correct dimensions” for e.g. a chair. The best dimensions are adjustable dimensions that provide a reasonable range of variability.

It is possible to apply this principle to website navigation as well and provide multiple ways of reaching the same content, so that people with different habits can find stuff using the way they are most comfortable with.