Any interaction with a customer or audience member. May also be called an “event,” “touchpoint,” “connection,” or “interaction.”

The cumulative set of engagements between an organization and an audience member.

An audience member’s perception of the quality of the relationship may be reflected in metrics like brand perception and net promoter score. The organization’s perception of relationship quality may be reflected in metrics like customer lifetime value.

The platform/technology used to facilitate the engagement.

Examples of engagement channels include Email, Websites, Sales Visits, Webinars, Service Calls, Mailers, Billboards, an Content Marketing.

A taxonomy is a way of organizing and classifying data to create a structured hierarchy. Information is grouped according to its characteristics and attributes.

For example, taxonomies are useful when organizing into categories and sub-categories, like a home improvement store's department and product categories.  Taxonomies are useful for filing new content into buckets or browsing existing content by grouping.

An ontology is a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.

It is a term borrowed from philosophy, but now in wide use in data science.  For the purposes of relationship management we use it to describe the relationships between who is engaging, the subject matter of the engagement, where the engagement occurred, how the engagement came to occur and why the organization wishes to promote the engagement.