Making taxonomy relate to real users

From PublicTechnology.net

Dorset For You, the pioneering online portal launched by five local councils this February to replace individual council websites, has adopted taxonomy-based technology from APR Smartlogik to boost information ‘findability’ through the site and make it even easier for citizens to access the information they need quickly and easily.
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The real intuitive element to search is delivered by creating a regional taxonomy, or thesaurus, to supplement the terms of the official category list and ensure that the search function can translate the language of citizens (for instance, “rubbish”) to match government documents (“waste disposal”). Semaphore’s taxonomy management tool will be used by dorsetforyou.com to underpin its search, also enabling the function to understand misspellings, slang and suggest synonyms.

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