Tags are a folksonomy, not a Taxonomy

[sayedimac]

A Taxonomy is a formal, hierarchical structure like:
Management Groups > Subscriptions > Resource Groups. This is the Azure Taxonomy.

Tags ignore this structure and allows you to group or segregate resource outside this structure and that makes it a Folksonomy.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/managed-metadata#:~:text=Important%20terminology%201%20Taxonomy.%20A%20taxonomy%20is%20a,8%20Enterprise%20Keywords%20column.%20...%209%20Tagging.%20

The sooner we change this the better - it manifests in all our content including MOC courseware (104, 900, etc) and MSLearn.

You can do an online search for Taxonomyu vs Folksonomy and it might make more sense.

Happy to help reword this if you want me to.

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Document Details

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• ID: 55b4c3f6-7ea3-9b94-cd8c-cbe37dc31656
• Version Independent ID: 0310805b-ff71-85bf-3f74-ca4caa6a46ce
• Content: Tag resources, resource groups, and subscriptions for logical organization - Azure Resource Manager
• Content Source: articles/azure-resource-manager/management/tag-resources.md
• Service: azure-resource-manager
• Sub-service: management
• GitHub Login: @tfitzmac
• Microsoft Alias: tomfitz

[MonikaReddy-MSFT]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We will investigate it further and update you shortly.

[tfitzmac]

@sayedimac - thanks for this feedback. I read the descriptions of the two terms and looked at definitions from other places. For resource tags, I do not think folksonomy is the correct term. These tags are not an informal system or one that involves collaboration from users. The organization defines the tags and often applies policies to ensure the correct tags are present. They enforce a tag structure because they use the tags to track costs. The names and values must meet expected settings.

#please-close

[sayedimac]

Hmm - When they refer to formal structure (taxonomy) they refer to a hierarchy.
Informal in the context implies outside of the formal structure and in Azure the "formal structure" is the Management Groups, Subs and RG's.

Even with Policy, that is just a form of automation or automating the classification of resources.

Either way - my suggestion is not for you to refer to Tags as a Folksonomy even though it is, my requirement is for you to stop referring to Tags as a Taxonomy because it is quite far from a hierarchy or a formal structure with parent child relationships.

[sayedimac]

[tfitzmac]

I have updated the doc to remove "taxonomy" as a description of tags. Thanks for the suggestion.

[sayedimac]

Thank you - now to get it out of all the MOC :) All our courses reference this so this might be quite a job... Thanks again