The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is composed of 12 separate Centers that engage in a variety of technological activities with product lines that reflect their specialized work. Technical communities across the Agency utilize highly evolved engineering and scientific vocabularies that reflect the nature of their disciplines. These vocabularies are often arcane and not easily translated by personnel outside a particular community of practice. This situation has tended to fragment information produced by NASA personnel. The goal behind building and adopting an agency-wide NASA Taxonomy is to develop a consistent framework for handling NASA’s electronic content, and to make it easy for various audiences to find all the relevant information from all the NASA programs quickly.

The top-level taxonomy was reviewed in an iterative process with stakeholders who responded to it in group meetings, via email, and in one-on-one conversations. The creation and validation of sub-trees and leaf nodes has been delegated to the subject matter specialists. Eleven taxonomy branches or facets were identified as a result of this project–Access Security Requirements, Audiences, Business Purpose, Competencies, Content Types, Industries, Instruments, Locations, Missions and Projects, Organizations, and Subject Categories–with content types identified as a key data driver. It turns out that content types or genres are a very important way that users segment their collections, or chunk larger content objects into smaller ones to support business functions and applications.

Much work was done to adopt categories for standard genre and document types in the Information facet of the taxonomy so that users could start with a common understanding of what document frameworks they might be looking for and working with. The taxonomy also provides an exhaustive list of NASA missions and projects, as well as a three-level enterprise-wide organizational hierarchy which previously did not exist.

The NASA Taxonomy website was built to provide access to the taxonomy. The website is integrated with the FirstGov and Google to provide instant web search results. A metadata search and navigation application on a collection with a quarter of a million internal project and public documents from across the enterprise was built to demonstrate the benefits of using the NASA taxonomy. The completed taxonomy and its mapping to the Dublin Core metadata standard is meant to act as a classification scheme encompassing all of NASA Web content, including internal as well as external materials. The taxonomy will provide the framework for tagging NASA Web material so that they can be used and reused in different applications such as the NASA portal and its supporting systems, the NASA search engine, and the NASA Web Site Registration System.