The AIRS/211 LA County Taxonomy may not be suitable for use by an organization for a number of reasons such as:
- It is specific to North America
- It is extremely comprehensive and hence may not be required by
organizations which don't provide a wide range of services
- An organization may prefer to maintain a taxonomy for which a
subscription isn't required
Such organizations can create their own custom taxonomy which can be used to index services and programs.
A custom taxonomy is stored using the same data structure, and maintained using similar processes as for the AIRS/211 LA County Taxonomy. The creation of a custom taxonomy follows the following steps:
- A taxonomy version is created, with the administrator specifying
the name, language country and version number
- Terms are added to the taxonomy, with the administrator defining
where the term sits in the hierarchy by defining a term's parent term,
setting the term status and adding any further information such as use
references
- When the taxonomy terms and hierarchy are complete, the taxonomy
is published
- Indexing takes place as described in Indexing Provider Services, to categorize
the resources offered by the organization
- Updates can be made by editing the existing version, and
re-publishing
An 'In Edit' version of a custom taxonomy can be deleted if it is no longer required. Translations can also be added using the standard localization functionality provided.