GOV.UK Taxonomy

"As members of the Finding Things team have written previously, we’ve long understood the need for a GOV.UK taxonomy that’s subject-based and site-wide, and we’ve been working towards achieving this challenging aim for a while. When finished, the taxonomy will group together all content on the site in a meaningful and intuitive way, using a hierarchical structure. It will consist of many ‘topics’ and ‘subtopics’, to which all content items will be tagged. We’re not there yet, but we do now have a branch that covers the government’s education offering - and with all the relevant content tagged to it, thanks to the tireless work of publishers within the government’s education organisations. (...)

So why does government need a site-wide taxonomy? Because government has a lot of content: more than 300,000 individual items, in fact. With so much content it can be very difficult for users to find the thing they’re looking for - or, if they’re searching more broadly around a subject, to find things of real value or relevance. We also know from user research with professional users like teachers, accountants, lawyers and tax specialists that there are people who need to see everything about a topic so they can do their job properly. Without a subject-based taxonomy in place, these users might only get partial information and not the full picture. This new taxonomy will act as a framework for a redesigned navigation, with the 2 working in tandem to help users orientate themselves and explore the site more confidently and effectively."