Last updated July 18, 2023
Type Taxonomy Setup & Use
Type taxonomies are a crucial tool for organizing digital content for findability and discovery. Product catalogs, services listings, resource types, and subject hierarchies are all commonly characterized by "type" organization: each child category describes a more specialize type of thing than the parent category. Well defined type taxonomies area powerful tool for making your content more discoverable and reusable across contexts.
In this guide you'll learn what makes "type" taxonomies different from other kinds of taxonomy structures, like topic or faceted taxonomies, and will learn how to set up a type taxonomy in the Sanity Taxonomy Manager plugin. You'll also see examples of how to integrate your taxonomy into document schemes and query across related concepts for tagged documents.
Type classification helps users navigate and browse categories from general to more specific and narrow down large content sets to specific items that meet their needs. It also allows information designers to assemble related content into meaningful collections and to provide richer search results based on parent/child relationships.
When combined with search term and traffic data, type taxonomies help you to draw deeper insight from visitor behaviors, and they can play a vital role in providing AI the ground truth it needs to return reliable, trustworthy results.
Key Features
- Relationships: Type taxonomies organize concepts in "is-a" relationships: "Nutrition Education" is a type of "Health Eduction," which is a type of "Education." These relationships, when consistently maintained, help users to confidently navigate categories, and can allow algorithms to accurately draw inferences about resources tagged with taxonomy terms.
- Adaptability: Type taxonomies can be tailored to a wide range of specific content collections or subject domains.
- Flexibility: Type taxonomies can be used to add structure to simple domains with only a handful of concepts, or can scale to many thousands of terms.
Setting Up a Type Taxonomy
1. Install Sanity Taxonomy Manager
The Taxonomy Manager plugin allows you to create standards compliant relationships that help keep your taxonomy interoperable and reusable.
2. Create a new concept scheme
Concept Schemes are used to create multiple taxonomies in a single project, and, where needed use the same concepts across them. This gives you a single source of truth for each concept you define, and allows you to establish semantic relationships between individual taxonomies.
Add a new Concept Scheme with either the global "new document" button, or the "new document" button in the Concept Schemes list view
3. Name and describe your taxonomy
Add a clear name and describe the purpose and goals of your taxonomy to users. Tagging content with managed terms may be new to your content creators: good descriptions can help users understand why the tagging step is important.
4. Add top concepts
Top Concepts are the entry points to your type hierarchy. While creating top concepts is not strictly required, using them can help you follow good modeling practices (by calling out "orphans" and showing unbalanced structures) and gives you more options for filtering terms and querying tagged content.
5. Add child concepts
Child concepts are the narrower types in your taxonomy. To create a consistent "is-a" hierarchy, you should be able to say that "[child concept] is a [parent concept]."
6. Add the taxonomy to a Sanity document scheme
You're now ready to publish your taxonomy, integrate it into your content scheme, and start tagging content. Taxonomy Manager includes two helper functions for ensuring that only the appropriate concepts are available for a given field:
- Scheme Filter: affords access any term in the designated Concept Scheme
- Branch Filter: affords access to terms in a specific branch of a designated Concept Scheme
- Docs: Adding Schemes to documents
Querying Content
Once your content is tagged, the semantics built into your type taxonomy allow you to retrieve content based on single concepts, or on relationships between concepts.
Get content tagged with a concept by prefLabel
*[_type == "post" && subject->prefLabel == "Anthropology"]
Get content tagged with a concept by conceptID
*[_type == "post" && subject->conceptId == "8a60d3"]
Each concept you create in Taxonomy Manager is automatically given a unique conceptId. You can find the conceptId below the Base URI field in the concept editor pane:
Get content tagged with the child concepts of a specified concept
*[_type == "post" &&
subject->conceptId in
*[_type == "skosConcept" && "8a60d3" in broader[]->conceptId].conceptId
]Get content tagged with a concept and content tagged by child concepts of that concept
*[_type == "post" &&
subject->conceptId == "8a60d3" ||
subject->conceptId in
*[_type == "skosConcept" && "8a60d3" in broader[]->conceptId].conceptId
]Well defined, standards compliant taxonomy provides a ground truth foundation for scores of different discovery, personalization, and business intelligence applications. The queries above offer just a few examples of how assiduously applied taxonomy can help you manage content based on the relationships you've created. Your dataset, taxonomy, and goals will be the most natural drivers for how your taxonomies are used to create value.
Learn More
Find more examples, applications, and tips in the Sanity Taxonomy Manager Docs >>
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