The PLEI Taxonomy, sponsored by the PLEI Working Group, is a tool designed to enable a coordinated, structured approach to describing public legal education and information resources from member organizations and others.

In the Clicklaw initiative, we are using the PLEI Taxonomy to categorize content on the Clicklaw site, which will allow users additional pathways to locate what they are looking for.

Update as of November 2009

We have made some tweaks to the Topics being used on the Clicklaw website. Here is the new taxonomy we’re now using: PLEI Taxonomy v.5.0 (PDF, 79KB). These changes include:

• splitting “Victims and crime” into two topics: “Victims of crime” and “Crimes & offences“
• changing “Immigrants” to “Immigrants & refugees“
• adding a new topic, “Cars & getting around“.

All of these changes are in response to the usability testing that we conducted over the summer.

Update as of December 2008

The PLEI Taxonomy, v. 4.0 (PDF, 38KB) is the version of the taxonomy being used on Clicklaw. This version features:

• a scaling back on the Topics facet (formerly called Legal Issues), reducing the number of topics and eliminating subcategories
• grouping of the Topics by client-centred labels such as “Your money”, “Your family”, “Your safety”, and so on
• the elimination of the Audience facet, which has been replaced by the use of client-centred section names on Clicklaw

These changes were informed by feedback from contributor organizations as well as ongoing content analysis work done by the Clicklaw project team.

Update as of October 2008

We are pleased to release the PLEI Taxonomy, v. 3.0 (PDF, 49KB). This version expands the number of Legal Issues covered, but simplifies some of the other facets (Audience, Media Format, and Source) and adds two new facets (Resource Type and Type of Help). These changes were informed by user testing of a wireframe prototype of the Clicklaw site, as well as content analysis work done by the Clicklaw project team and input from organizations formally participating in the project.

What is the PLEI Taxonomy?

The PLEI taxonomy is made up of categories that complement the abilities of search to help users find resources on Clicklaw. The taxonomy categories represent aspects of things that are hard to capture with just keyword search terms. The taxonomy categories will allow users of Clicklaw to:

• click on categories to locate resources
• refine their search results
• link in to related information

The taxonomy includes categories for:

• Topics: what the resource is about (Family law, Debt, Consumer, etc.).
• Resource type: the nature of the information (basics, self-help & forms, programs & courses, etc.).
• Media format: the format the resource is in (web, video, PDF, etc.).
• Language: the language of the resource (Chinese, Punjabi, Spanish, etc.)
• Type of help: for law-related services only, the type of help offered (advocacy, advice or representation, information or self-help, etc.).