Is a taxonomy really “a kind of” ontology? Or is a taxonomy really a classification scheme? We all talk the
talk, but what do we really mean? And what does management really hear when we talk with them and
seek buy-in? Join Wendi Pohs for this opening interactive networking session where we meet each other
and compare notes about the definitions of the terms that matter to us.

As we embark on 2 days of intensive and informative discussions about taxonomies, Regli describes the “current state of the taxonomy nation”:  What’s happening with taxonomies, where progress is occurring and where struggles continue. Are enterprises still focused on, and investing in, taxonomies?  Is technology replacing the need for librarians and taxonomists? Are taxonomies losing momentum or ready for full steam ahead? Hear what our industry watcher predicts.

It’s one thing to lay the groundwork for a taxonomy with strategy and planning, but quite another to follow through with implementing the strategies and plans and realizing the results. Follow how the city of St. Louis and the FDA benefited from investing in their plans and what was learned while putting those plans into action.

Taxonomy software is an increasingly complex vendor and feature-rich landscape. In addition to basic development features designed to make the task of the taxonomist simpler and more productive, there’s a whole range of capabilities built on top of taxonomy management, from categorization rules associated with each taxonomy node to distributed taxonomy development, entity extraction, and sentiment analysis. This means the old method of enumerating features and developing a score card simply doesn’t work very well. Reamy looks at what’s new and includes an in-depth analysis of critical capabilities designed to match software capabilities with a range of possible applications.

Some taxonomies are used by human indexers or taggers, while other taxonomies are linked to content by automated indexing (auto-categorization).  This difference in how the taxonomy is used plays a significant role in how the taxonomy is constructed. Usage influences how taxonomy concepts are defined, what kind and how many variant (nonpreferred) terms are created, and how structured the term relationships are. The indexing method also impacts the taxonomy support tasks in policy development, rules writing, scope note writing, and training.

Continue the day’s discussions with new colleagues and old friends over drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Meet and talk with the speakers and the conference sponsors.

Join colleagues and Taxonomy Boot Camp faculty for breakfast and discussion.  Trade ideas, share solutions, and tap into the experience of othersbefore beginning the day’s program.

ConocoPhillips, the 9th largest corporation in the world, is well known for its exceptionally successful enterprise knowledge sharing program. This case study describes how ConocoPhillips uses a highly scalable, hierarchical taxonomy with auto-categorization, integrated search, and entity extraction applied to a SharePoint knowledge sharing environment.  Accessing distributed content sources from a variety of internal and external locations, it features a very intuitive user interface design that facilitates strong user acceptance with almost no need for user training.  Speakers highlight the problems being solved, the solution requirements, design considerations, and implementation techniques.

Its easy to create your taxonomy, its even easier to create documents and content in your SharePoint portal or intranet. The hard part is getting users to apply the proper tags for classification and organization purposes to utilize all of the hard work you put into building your taxonomy to get the most out of your SharePoint portal or intranet and find the document later! Don shows how a Silicon Valley company leveraged their taxonomist, multiple taxonomies and a couple of corporate applications to create a user friendly metadata search tool for SharePoint with auto classification of all content. In order to find documents, users simply start typing and the solution automatically suggests terms from the corporate taxonomy (metadata) in a drop down menu with in their SharePoint search box. After the user has done their initial query, the user can select facets to further filter down to the exact document or item they are looking for. Don focuses on the current capabilities of building a taxonomy within SharePoint and then demonstrates how to build on top of that with other third party tools like Interse's iBox and others.

Content classification is a key enabler for information management initiatives and helps drive better business outcomes by automating tedious categorization decisions and increasing the value and accessibility of your content. Learn about the different methods of classification, discover through real-world examples how these methods can be used to automate time-consuming and error-prone manual decisions, and learn how to optimize the balance between human and automated decision making. By optimizing this balance, you can realize a rapid ROI on your content investments by reducing employee involvement, freeing them to focus on their core responsibilities.

This case study addresses the challenges ProQuest faced in managing multilingual controlled vocabularies using multiple Word documents and authority files maintained in an Oracle database. Speakers describe how implementing a thesaurus management tool helped ProQuest simplify and standardize its business semantic management to create a common language and connect disparate information assets as well as handling large and varied vocabularies and authority files, linking new and existing editorial systems and enabling hierarchical views, and automating thesaurus management tasks.

What is the actual cost and benefit of a taxonomy, and how on earth do you measure it — and communicate those measures? Speakers look at both the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of measuring the impact and “return” and conveying that impact to key users and stakeholders.  They talk about Data Harmony’s experience with showing savings in staff; input time; and increased findability in an association, a corporation, and a government agency.