The Taxonomy module is one of the most well-known and powerful core modules in Drupal.
Outside of Drupal, taxonomies are used to classify content. You can find them readily in academic, governmental, and corporate applications. The Taxonomy module in Drupal gives us the ability to categorize/classify the content in our websites in this fashion.
We do this by creating vocabularies with Taxonomy which are then attached to different content types. As content is created by site contributors, they can then tag the content with provided terms. The content can then be handled in a variety of ways to display categorized or related content.
There are many different contributed modules that leverage and extend the substantial power that Taxonomy brings to the table. It's often used as a either a manual or automated filtering tool in Views or for a variety of navigational tasks.
In the OSU Drupal 7 distribution, the architect role is the only one that can administer Taxonomy vocabularies, but all roles that are permitted to create content can use a Taxonomy vocabulary if its included on a content type.
So let's take a look at how to work with Taxonomy and some of the different ways it can assist you.