Abstract
Taxonomies are a well-established instrument for organizing and accessing resources in Information, Content and Knowledge Management (ICKM) systems. Furthermore, they contribute to a common understanding and an improved communication in the user community by fostering the development and usage of a shared vocabulary. In addition to these operational usage scenarios, we argue in this paper that a taxonomy is also a valuable medium in system design. We present a meta-design framework for systematically supporting the user in the setup, customization and evolution of Web-based ICKM system instances, which is based on a model-based domain construction approach. Taxonomies are exploited both as the fundamental basis for the construction process itself and as the principal support for context-driven access the common metamodel in this framework implementing the ontological commitment underlying the complete framework. These manifold forms of taxonomy exploitation are supported by a flexible taxonomy component that enables multiple classifications of arbitrary resources, effective taxonomy management, and context-adaptive taxonomy reduction in our ICKM meta-design framework.