3. Classify

Create and manage taxonomies

The Networker can be used to create and manage taxonomies. Taxonomies are hierarchical classifications of topics.

Note. This session has been designed mostly for subject matter experts and content professionals.

In this session, we will create a taxonomy of geographical locations. We will use different methods to express the fact that California, New York, and Texas are US states.

We will also show a unique feature of the Networker: taxonomical relationships are just another type of relationship. You can easily change them and assign a different kind of relation semantic of your choice.

Click on Settings ⚙. Check the Hierarchy and Custom Roles buttons, then click Settings again to close the panel. You can uncheck Web and Text, to save space on your display.

Two dialog boxes now appear on each topic page above and below the Relations panel: ⌃Up to enter the broader terms, ⌄Down for the narrower terms.

Search for New York, click on "New York ◑ State".

Click  ⌄Down, and in Add Narrower Term, enter or select New York City.

Click on New York City. Notice that New York State appears in the ⌃Up box. Conceptually, broader and narrower are two faces of the same coin. When A is broader than B, B is automatically narrower than A.

Go back to the New York State page. On that page, click on ⌃Up , in Add Broader Term, and type USA and press Enter.

Now, let's introduce a synonym for USA. Click on USA. When the USA page shows up, click on the Names button. In the dialog box showing New Name, enter United States of America. Close the box.

Let's make the full name the preferred name. On the line containing United States of America, press the Prefer (Thumb up) button. The name United States of America now appears in a larger font size on top and is used to reference this topic from other topics.

In addition, let's keep a list of acronyms. Click on the Edit Menu button near USA and on the "Kind" triangle icon ( second icon after Scope). When the "Kind of Name" prompt appears, type Acronym and press Enter. Accept the name "USA Acronym" in the bottom of the box by clicking on it. In the Discover Menu, on the top navigation bar, click on the option Kinds and click on Acronym. You will see the list of acronyms in use.

On the USA page, click on ⌄Down and in Add Narrower Term, enter California and press Enter.

Create a new topic by clicking on +New Topic on the toolbar on the right, and enter Texas. When the Texas page is displayed, click on ⌃Up and enter USA. Validate. You will notice that instead of USA, which you just typed, the link mentions United States of America, because it is the same topic and the preferred name is displayed. 

Search for New York City. In the ⌃Up panel, you will see that below New York State, a new line appears that contains < United States of America.

When using the hierarchical relationships, you will see that all the parents of a given topic are displayed. You can click on any of the parents to open the corresponding topic page.

Scan your categories.

What is on the left end of a broader/narrower relationship can be sometimes considered a category, and what is on the right is an item belonging to that category.

A subcategory is simply a category that is an item in another category. If A is broader than B and B is broader than C, then A is a top-level category, B is a subcategory, and C is an item belonging both to the subcategory B and the top level category A. There is no limit to the number of categories and subcategories that you can create.

Refresh your browser page. Click on the Discover menu. Choose the option Broader >. Click on it and it will show you all the topics used either as categories or subcategories. Clicking on either of them will display the corresponding topic page, in which the narrower topics are displayed.

Modify the semantic of the relationship when needed.

Under the hood, the broader/narrower relationship is just one specific type of relationship. The role that describes the relation between the origin and the destination, is represented by the symbol ">". This notation has been chosen because it it easy to understand. "USA > Texas" means that USA is broader than Texas.

It may happen that the relation you have created between two topics, by stating that one is broader than the other, is not reflecting nuances that you need to express, it is too simplistic, or things have changed, and you need to refine it.

Create a topic called United Kingdom and two narrower topics: England and Scotland.

First, click on +New Topic, enter United Kingdom.

In the new page for United Kingdom, click on Down⌄. Enter England, and press Enter.

Click on the button Down⌄, enter Scotland and press Enter.

The topic United Kingdom has two narrower terms, England and Scotland.

No relations are displayed in the Relations panel. Click on the Connect button, then on Settings, and verify that the Custom Roles box is checked. When this setting is on, you can create express how things are related - in technical terms, this is called expressing the semantic of the relationship by declaring a role - in addition to the things which are related together.

Let's imagine a scenario in which Scotland decides to split from the United Kingdom to become its own country. Then the relation "broader/narrower" which implies that the topic on the right is part of the topic on the left, would have to be modified. The relationship between Scotland and United Kingdom has to be changed, for example into "neighbor of".

However, the hierarchical relation doesn't give access to the semantic, which is fixed (broader than/narrower than). In order to make this relation equivalent to any other relation, click on the Connect button, then on Settings, and uncheck Hierarchy. Click on Settings to close the panel.

Refresh your browser if you still see the Up and Down panels.

Click on the Edit button close to the relation between United Kingdom and Scotland. Every component in that relation is now editable. The role expressing the broader relationship is marked with a > sign. Click on the button containing Broader than >, and when prompted to enter a role, enter Neighbor of.

The other editable areas include the related topic, that can be changed. The right arrows in a  square ▷ enable you to go to the page for the topic representing the role. Note that there are two such arrows per line, because the role in a relation is also a topic, and has its own topic page, which can be enriched with any information available on another topic page.

Among the other boxes available, Flip has the effect of reverting the orientation of the relation, so that A -> B becomes B -> A. As indicated, it is possible to delete a relation, and a confirmation will be requested before deletion is made. There is no undo mechanism. Any relation that has been deleted would have to be re-created if it was deleted by mistake.

Let's modify the semantic of the relationship between United Kingdom and Scotland by clicking in the box containing the >  on the line showing Scotland. In the dialog box, replace the > sign by typing Neighbor of. It now appears in a blue box with a checkmark ✓, on which you will click to validate the new role.

Notice that this relation is now displayed in the Connect Panel, not any more in the Down Panel.

There is an option to consider that semantic relations are just like others. Go to Settings ⚙, uncheck the box Hierarchy. Now all relations, including the hierarchical relations, appear in the Connect panel. The hierarchical relations are indicated by using > to separate the broader term from the narrower term. It is possible to create a new hierarchical relation just by using > as the role describing the relation.

Note. A broader/narrower relation will always be written starting with the broader term, using the > sign and ending with the narrower term. You could decide to use the < sign to start from the narrower to the broader, and this is a perfectly acceptable kind of relation. However, those relations will not be understood by the Networker to be of the built-in type broader/narrower. Therefore, if you choose to benefit from the ability to show the broader/narrower terms in different panels, and have them listed, you should avoid creating relations such as A < B and only write relations as A > B.

Generic relations.

When topics are related with no specific semantic, there is no role and it is displayed in the relation panel as Related. Using the Underline Topics mechanism described in the previous section results in the creation of generic relations. Also, generic relations are created when the Custom Roles box is unchecked or when creating a relation by only filling the box with Related Topic and leaving the box with Role unfilled.

To add semantic to a generic relation, Custom Roles must be checked in the settings.

Remove semantic from a relation

It is possible to make a previously semantically qualified relation generic. For example, let's modify the relation between United Kingdom and Scotland. Instead of using Neighbor of as a role, let's just relate them without indicating how they are related.

Near  ⇄ Connect, click on the Edit button (with a pen icon) for the relation with Scotland. Click on the box containing Neighbor of. Make sure Autofill is set to OFF. Hover above "Neighbor of" and click on the X sign located at the end of the box. That should make the expression Neighbor of vanish. Then click on the Submit ✓ button.

Note that if you experience difficulties to empty the role, you can set the Autofill option to off, and then enter a space and use the Backspace key.

If instead you would have typed the word Related you would have created your own version of a generic relation, which is not the built-in generic relation.

Add semantic to a generic relation

To add semantic to a generic relation, make sure that the Settings ⚙are configured with the Custom Roles checked. Click on a relation with no explicit role, where the role appears as Related after clicking on the Edit button, and replace the word "Related" by a name of your choice. For example, retrieve the relation between United Kingdom and Scotland, and create your own qualifier to describe their relationship.

Next session: Click on the Back button and on 4. Explore your connections.