Mike and Gary lead participants through the process of identifying the critical components of successful taxonomy projects including tool selection, governance, integration, and staffing, and then engage everyone in an interactive networking session sharing project war stories — the tactics that worked and those that didn’t! Join your colleagues for a great conversation about taxonomy projects.

Social tools are changing our world and our enterprises. It is amazing how much and how quickly information is added by the community when it is relevant. How do organizations take advantage of this to enhance their information and knowledge flows, improve productivity, and streamline the enterprise? Vander Wal, who coined the term “folksonomy”, focuses on the huge untapped potential for social tools with discussions about making it easier for enterprise social tool adoption, tagging, getting tools to mesh, modifying Web 2.0 approaches for the enterprise, interface/interaction design for ease of use, sociality and encouragement of use. He highlights interesting examples of organizations using social tools to enhance their knowledge enterprise. While social tools and services that make up enterprise 2.0 provide a foundation for enterprises, Vander Wal points to some challenges and possible solutions. Filled with ideas and insights you can use in your organization.

Patrick uses data from surveys of information management and taxonomy professionals worldwide to explore the evolving role of taxonomists and the “stretch” challenges facing what has traditionally been a highly technical and tightly scoped discipline. Key topics include: What do taxonomists say they do? Where do the demands for taxonomy work spring from? What transdisciplinary skills in information management, including understanding and applying standards, are required?

With five business segments operating in 140 countries, Deloitte has over 18 KM platforms. To respond to the business requirements, Deloitte designed an enterprise taxonomy program with four key components: a centralized taxonomy; country- and function-specific terms as local extensions; global taxonomy and local extensions mapped and connected in the form of the master thesaurus; and subsets of taxonomy that can be generated from the Master Thesaurus for customized use of taxonomy for a specific system or application. Wang shares lessons learned during the journey of integrating the enterprise taxonomy and search journey.

This panel of content management problem-solvers shares their experiences and perspectives of successfully determining the return on investment for folksonomy, taxonomy, and ontology initiatives. Using real-world examples, they illustrate value in many different types of organizations.

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.

Taxonomy investments can do far more than simply improve the enterprise search experience. Taxonomic structures are versatile enough to be built up and broken down for different contexts. Leslie examines the trends in generating and applying taxonomies throughout the information lifecycle to make the process of creating, capturing, distributing, using and preserving information more efficient.

Alex and Tom outline the latest commercial & open-source taxonomy tools. Gary then identifies approaches for identifying requirements around modeling, governance, integration, workflow, and user profiles as well as strategies for scoping, justifying, and getting buy-in for the project — whether you decide to buy or build. He also covers how to package this in such a way that you get the best answers from your vendors.

Taxonomies increasingly need to be combined, merged, or linked to create a unified enterprise taxonomy from separate departments or to reconcile folksonomies with taxonomies. Heather presents an introduction to merging or integrating taxonomies and making use of standard thesaurus relationships (equivalence, hierarchical, and associative) to determine how to merge/map vocabularies on a term-by-term basis. Wendi’s case study describes how mapping terms, derived from standard data sources and legacy applications, into a merged taxonomy supports a faceted search system at IBM. Carol describes best practices in taxonomy rationalization to address the problems that inevitably crop up during the merging. Andy, who works with business units at Washington State’s Department of Transportation, looks at how he maps its data assets vocabulary with other business areas within the agency and its metadata repository as it pertains to vocabulary interoperability, including managing application schemas and linkages between databases of terms.

Join Wendi Pohs and this panel of experts as they peer into the future of taxonomies. Each panelist concentrates on a specific area, including semantic management tools, consumer-driven taxonomies, social networking software, and emerging semantic technologies. We’ve asked these speakers to both enlighten and challenge you, so bring your thinking caps and questions.