Taxonomies allow you to add custom categorization and filtering to your site.
Sites on the Mosaic platform can have up to fifteen different custom taxonomies. These could be used, for example, to assign a subject area to articles, events, and people. Cross-departmental groups could use this feature to indicate which department a person or project is primarily attached to.
To create a new taxonomy, go to Site Settings, and select Taxonomies from the left-hand menu, then click the Taxonomy Administration link at the top of the page. Once you've created your taxonomy and added some terms to it, decide which content types (e.g. articles, events, or people) you want it to apply to. When you add or edit content of these types, you'll then be able to add taxonomy terms.
When a page contains a listing of items of one of the selected content types, users will see a drop-down list allowing them to filter items by the taxonomy terms. (If you don't want this to appear on a given page, you can choose not to display the taxonomy - you'll find this option on the listing widget.) The People page on this site includes an example of this: there are two drop-down lists that allow users to filter the people listed, by subject area, and/or by the projects they're involved in. (For an example with several different taxonomies applied to a large number of content items, see the Faculty of History's Academics page.)
You can also use the taxonomies to pre-filter page content, and just display items with a particular taxonomy term attached to them. For example, this page for a (fictional) research project includes a listing of just the people involved, created using the projects taxonomy.
