PoolParty Reviews

PoolParty has a great user experience for the taxonomists and ontologists who work in it regularly. Many other solutions in this category seem outdated, overbuilt for our needs and would have taken lots of time for training.

We were starting from scratch on our enterprise taxonomy project and needed to prove out the value early, which is hard without practically building out the whole thing end-to-end from the outset. But PoolParty made it easy and fast for us to get going with lite version, and better yet, one that would grow with us as we mature. We're able to evolve from hierarchies, to custom relationships, to graph.

PoolParty offers an intuitive and easy to learn UI. The tool is based on the [W3.org's SKOS standard](https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/). This means if this is your first taxonomy there are strong guide rails. This allowed us to bring in the power of ontology, in a standard Thesaurus data structure (SKOS) and build on that rather than get bogged down with discussions of what relations to define and what the label should be called. This was Plug and Play.

They have a good API, but had some bugs. Because we were going through a US based third party for support, sometimes bug fixes took longer than we wanted. Even so, we were able to build what we needed, demo and deploy a taxonomy driven solution in record time.

Take advantage of the PoolParty training videos (YouTube)

Be familiar with SKOS