work

Developing Multilingual Taxonomy for a large global non-profit organization

Dovecot designed and implemented a new multilingual taxonomy to equip a global non-profit for large-scale website architecture and dynamic content delivery. Developed to support the organization's website redesign, the new taxonomy harmonized several divergent vocabularies and is based on an in-depth content analysis. The new design has reduced editorial workload, increased findability, and improved site engagement.

Challenge

The internal workings of this organization are highly complex: they are based on legal mechanisms and organizational workflows, which all produce many different kinds of content at different stages of their process. The sheer volume of content was also challenging: nearly 20,000 pages of HTML content plus 30,000 digital assets, all housed in several different systems. Existing vocabularies had grown organically over time, resulting in different labels, various levels of granularity, and no mapping between concepts.

The organization needed a unifying taxonomy to support the complex business logic behind their new information architecture. They needed to make sure their site served up the right content in all the right places, without onerous manual work

Approach

Analysis & Strategy

We collaborated with the UX and development teams to iteratively refine an overall taxonomy strategy and document the metadata needed for each content type. Working with stakeholders, we identified opportunities to limit the amount of effort by content creators when entering metadata. We included only essential properties specified by the site requirements in the final framework.

Taxonomy Development

Once we had sign-off on the taxonomy and metadata strategy, we audited and compared existing vocabularies and identified gaps and conflicts. Through research into specific subject areas, we carefully crafted labels and levels of granularity, especially around sensitive human rights issues.

Since the taxonomy development coincided with a broader content audit project, we could leverage the audit to “test drive” our proposed content types to ensure they fit the content.

Cross-mapping

After finalizing the taxonomy and validating it with stakeholders, we cross-mapped the taxonomy with the existing vocabularies. These mappings supported both programmatic retagging of content to be migrated and the creation of links to other legacy systems. Using these mappings, web developers easily incorporated the retagging into the content migration process using scripts and APIs.

Migration and Retagging

Not all legacy content had been tagged consistently, so we needed to perform additional retagging and migration after completing our cross mapping. Using a pattern matching script that looked for clues in URLs, titles, and other metadata, we determined which tags to apply.

After developers migrated content into the Drupal CMS, the Dovecot tagging team reviewed and adjusted the automated tags as needed. They simultaneously conducted QA testing and cleaned up migrated content (e.g., added thumbnail images, or other missing metadata properties).

Solution

Dovecot supported the organization throughout the entire web relaunch process. From early analysis and requirements gathering to taxonomy development, we collaborated iteratively with web development partners. Through the retagging and migration process, we made sure that stakeholders had the information they needed to move forward.

Following the success of their website relaunch, future projects with the organization are likely to include retagging older content collections, iterative refinements to the taxonomy, and IA enhancements.

Unified and enhanced more than 6 taxonomies across 5 sources and workstreams
Tagged more than 20,000 pieces of content
Relaunched a new website that is streamlined, scalable, and usable