Knowledge Category/ Taxonomy

[RogueFader]

Hi all.

Just looking to get a steer from someone wiser than I on how they went around creating knowledge categories.

The knowledge process was handed over to myself, however when I review what categories people chose when creating a new article, there seems to be no continuity.  If creating an article for a technical team, the category picker shows something like "Internal Digital Technology and a sub cat of Software", and people have an option to create a third category so they can drill down and be more specific, so the article may be  "Internal Digital Technology>Software>Adobe" for example.

Using  Hardware as the example, I was thinking if I could use "Internal Digital Technology>Hardware>laptop" or "Internal Digital Technology>Hardware>monitor", what I'm looking to get an idea on, is if other people have done something similar and have three or more levels, or do you keep the categories to a minimum, but then use service offering, so the example I gave for hardware "Internal Digital Technology>Hardware>laptop", you may only use "Internal Digital Technology>Hardware" but then use a Service Offering of "Laptop/PC Hardware support"

Sorry if this all sounds convoluted, this is all fairly new to me and I'm trying to get my head around this and how it should look,

Thanks in advance.

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi!

Categories and taxonomies can definitely be a bit of a minefield to get right at the start, but when done well, they add real value for both the knowledge base users and the knowledge team.

From the user side, a well-structured category system makes it easier to navigate and find relevant content. It also allows you to create direct links to specific categories or bundle similar articles together, which is great for user experience. On the management side, categories are useful for reporting. You can report on which categories are being used, any trending issues etc.

One thing I’d recommend is being mindful of the naming conventions. It’s important that category names make sense not just internally, but also to the end user. Will someone outside your team understand what “Internal Digital Technology” means if they see it as a category on the portal?

Drilling down into subcategories can be helpful, but it’s worth asking whether each level adds value. If a sub-subcategory only contains a couple of articles, it might not justify its own space — and could actually make content harder to find.

A useful exercise I’ve found is pulling all articles into Excel (or a similar tool) and scanning for common keywords in the titles or short descriptions. If a term appears frequently enough (across a meaningful percentage of the entire knowledge base) it might be worth creating a category for it.

Hope that helps! Would love to hear how others have approached this too.

Eoghan, 

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[RogueFader]

Thank you. 

Looking only at the public knowledge base rather than the internal one, it seems that we have a knowledge base with 93 categories of knowledge. There's some real mess there that I've inherited, for instance some articles are against Outlook, others Email, others 0365 Outlook. We have a category just called software although I feel that's too high level and would rather be more granular but not have umpteen subcategories to scroll through to be specific.

So for your org, would you have one where a category may be hardware, with a subcategory of one of laptop, thin client, monitor etc... or would you just keep it as Hardware and then maybe use a Service Offering to specify it's laptop, thin client etc.... Thanks again

[Pam Calvey]

Keep in mind that you have a character limit on your category fields, mine is 40. 

[Pam Calvey]

Read this post from 2021... Solved: Where to find additional information about knowled... - ServiceNow Community