# Taxonomy - Categorising content

Taxonomy is a core Drupal/GovCMS module that gives your website(s) use of the organisational keywords known in other systems as categories, tags, or metadata. It allows you to connect, relate and classify your website’s content. In GovCMS, these terms are gathered within “vocabularies”. The Taxonomy module allows you to create, manage and apply those vocabularies.

Taxonomy should be driven by the business requirements of your website, thinking about possible future functional expansion. Here are some questions to help you determine how you may want to use taxonomy:

* Are there subsections of your site that you’d like to look different from the main theme?
* Are there content areas of your site that should be edited only by a specific part of your organisation?
* Is there content that can be shared across your site (such as a press release, form or fact sheet)?
* Is there a business need to support local sites such as service centres or local events?
* Are there different ‘states’ you need to set (such as left navigation/breadcrumbs) for site sections?
* Do you need to provide default lists of content by taxonomy term or default RSS feeds by term?

Many contributed modules rely on Taxonomy-generating; for example, menus based on existing tags.

You may also like to refer to [https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/core/modules/taxonomy/taxonomy-module-overview](https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/core/modules/taxonomy/taxonomy-module-overview) for more information on taxonomy.

![Image of Vocabulary and Terms](https://3186608908-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-LzAsrTcKaHnLDg-7ALW%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-232f94293365b9ffc0842b736c5e1812e1e5cdaf%2F75.png?alt=media)

## List (text) field versus taxonomy

You can also add a "List (text)" field to a content type. What’s the difference between List (text) and a taxonomy field?

To manage values in the **List (text)** field, a privileged user role (like Site Administrator) is required to alter the site configuration. Taxonomy, on the other hand, could be managed similarly to content by Content Editors.

## Normalise content types with Taxonomy

Taxonomy can be used in a workflow, to customise defined sections of your website with different themes or to display specific content based on taxonomy terms. Although taxonomy can be used in various ways, probably the most important use of taxonomy in GovCMS is to relate content.
