Including externally-managed taxonomies in your project

You can use Developer Studio to include an externally-managed taxonomy into your project, but you cannot alter the taxonomy within Developer Studio, even after importing it.

Ensure you are working with an externally-managed taxonomy, and not an externally-created dimension.

An overview of the process to include an externally-managed taxonomy in a Developer Studio project is as follows:

You build an externally-managed taxonomy using a third-party tool. This guide does not describe any third-party tools or procedures that you might use to perform this task.
You create an XSLT style sheet that instructs Forge how to transform the taxonomy into Endeca XML that conforms to external_dimensions.dtd.
You configure your Developer Studio pipeline to perform the following tasks:
1. Describe the location of an externally-managed taxonomy and an XSLT style sheet with a dimension adapter.
2. Transform an externally-managed taxonomy into an externally-managed dimension by running a baseline update.
3. Add an externally-managed dimension to the Dimensions view and the Dimension Values view.

After you finish the tasks listed above, you can perform additional pipeline configuration that uses the externally-managed dimension, and then run a second baseline update to process and tag your Endeca records.