[Sigia-l] locations of synonym terms in hierarchical taxonomies?

[Vanessa Wolfe-Coote]

It also depends on the purpose of the taxonomy:

- A browse taxonomy lends itself to exposing synonyms where they occur. One
user might be familiar with 'PDA', another with 'Handheld'. Supplying both
maximises the chances of the users reaching the desired content/resource.

- An indexing taxonomy may need to be stricter in terms of how it assigns
keywords to a particular resource. To reduce the complexity of the indexing
it may be better to stick to a preferred term and various non-preferred
terms.

- A taxonomy used as the primary navigation on a site may also need to be
more discriminatory as the appearance of synonyms in the same list may be
confusing for users.
(I was recently lloking for a combined printer/scanner/copier and came
across a site (sorry can't remember which) which had links to 'All-in-one
printers' and 'Multifunction printers' which pointed to the same page. I
felt obliged to explore both links in case I missed out on a great deal, but
on discovering they pointed to the same page, got irritated for having
wasted my time doing so)

My understanding of Multites is that it won't force the synonyms to exist at
the same level of the hierarchy, but if they were at completely different
levels, can they really be regarded as synonyms?

regards
vanessa