We think we're designing software, websites, and experiences. But we're not. We are agents of change. Our systems shape belief and behavior at scale. If we hope to be better, empathy for the user isn't enough. We must also wrangle with culture, governance, methods, metrics, and the false dichotomies of mind-body and plan-build, because the things we make are reflections of how we see and sort ourselves. In this spirited tour of information architecture, organizational strategy, and systems thinking, Peter Morville draws from his new book,Intertwingled,to reveal how everything is connected, from code to culture. It's a trip into the wilderness of cognition and complexity that delivers a simple message: Since categories are the cornerstones of both cognition and culture, taxonomy shapes everything we do.

This tutorial covers the fundamental strategies, standards, and design methodologies for developing taxonomies for your organization's systems, whether content management, digital asset management, metadata management, or search. It is based on best practices for establishing information structure and managing and governing your digital assets. Learn strategies for developing a taxonomy, improving metadata schemas, establishing good governance using taxonomies and metadata, and calculating ROI for particular classes of users, digital assets, and media channels. 

Taxonomies should be designed with enough flexibility and transition points to be a bridge to other taxonomies and datasets. Enabling your taxonomy to fit into the larger universe of partner companies, industry standards, federal requirements and complementary term sets gives it a solid foundation for future growth. Term sets like ISO country names, Library of Congress Subject Headings, and DBpedia ensure that the viability of your homegrown taxonomy will survive in the wider ecosystem of digital information. Speakers explore which vocabulary sets are available for reuse by the enterprise information architect and demonstrate how thinking about semantic integration from the beginning of the design process helps build a taxonomy that endures.

Join us for drinks and hors d'oeuvres in a relaxed atmosphere as we kick off the start of this year's event. Open to all attendees, speakers, and sponsors.

Taxonomies Turning Unstructured Data Into Actionable Intelligence

From social media posts to websites, news articles, patents and reports, companies are struggling to gain actionable insight from the amount of unstructured data available to them today. This session describes the approach taken by A.T. Kearney's Data Science Team to discover new knowledge from a big dataset. The approach outlines the importance of leveraging the human element while combining it with the efficiency and scale of machines for maximum effect.

Metadata Makeover at Statistics Canada

This case study looks at Canada's national statistical agency, which is now completing a 3-year makeover of its metadata- based navigation and search. A team of metadata specialists has worked with subject matter experts to improve information scent, tagging, and governance to provide easy access to about 6 million website pages. As the Government of Canada's largest publisher, this project manually reviewed and added metadata such as titles, descriptions, subjects and geodescriptors to over 50,000 tables, articles and reference material-available in both English and French. In addition, a thorough review of their subject taxonomy was undertaken to provide more precision at second and third levels. 

IP Life Sciences Taxonomy Software Solutions

IP & Life Sciences Division of Thomson Reuters is a global pro- vider of scientific information related to patents, clinical trials, regulatory affairs, drug competitive intelligence, systems biology, and other information. Sweeney discusses how taxonomy management software enables day-to-day processes and operations of professional services of the division as well as innovative approaches in taxonomy applications. He also shows how a taxonomy cross-mapping tool enables quick evaluation of taxonomy overlap and creates an environment for subject matter experts to establish equivalence or ontological relations for terms from different taxonomies. 

Designing Taxonomies to Drive Content Publishing

TheKnot.com has been the most popular online wedding resource since launching the AOL keyword "knot" in September 1996. In 2014, every application, database, and admin tool was thrown out and rebuilt in-house to support a full site redesign where usability and users are the top priority. All 300,000-plus wedding vendors, 120,000-plus real wedding images, 8,000-plus dresses, and 1,500-plus advice articles were reclassified using a single categorization scheme. These new agile taxonomies drive all SEO targeting, search engine-friendly URL construction, advertising targeting, and both the site search and recommendations system infrastructure. Carroll covers the process of designing the taxonomies; getting buy-in across business, product, and engineering teams; and managing a fast-paced, high profile taxonomy project within a large organization. 

Boundaries With Taxonomies & Integration With SKOS

In any given organization, the publishing and the HR departments have good reasons to define the term "title" differently; and even the term "customer" can mean different things to different departments. If these different groups use a standard such as the W3C's SKOS to create their own taxonomies, they can get the benefit of tailor-made taxonomies customized to their needs, but they can also create connections between these taxonomies. Hear from DuCharme how SKOS makes this possible and how tools support this process without requiring knowledge of SKOS's in- ternals and syntax. Busch discusses what's missing from SKOS, why and what should be done about it. He shares how SKOS is an under-specified framework for encoding knowledge organization schemes and discusses how this can be addressed by using other namespaces such as FOAF (Friend of a Friend) and Schema.org.

Using External Taxonomies in the Hyper-Connected Enterprise

This session looks at how Amgen created a service that connects internal and external ontologies and makes them available to the enterprise. Using taxonomies to improve the management and accessibility of metadata was well established. However, it was also important to leverage published terminologies that the growing collaborative network had in common. With more and more external ontologies, especially in the biosciences, now available in standard formats like OWL, OBO, and SKOS, the challenge is how to effectively reuse that information without reinventing the wheel. Hear how one organization used published terminology from those sources and connected it to internal terminology and systems, all while retaining the integrity of the originals. 

Join us for an intensive session with four industry professionals who have been working in the Linked Open Data space. Each speaker has under 7 minutes and only 20 slides to teach us about a different Linked Data concept, tool, application, format, speculation, or case study. What is Linked Data? How can I use it? How do I get it? What does that have to do with my taxonomy? Hear about all of this-and whatever else we can squeeze in-in this fast-paced look at the Linked Data landscape. 

Using Text Analytics as a Toolset

Big data inferences are increasingly used to mine huge heaps of data. The applications are endless. However, those inferences do not work well when many lines go to a single bubble. The lines and relationships must be drawn between concepts, not simply between words. Using the text analytics is a powerful tool, but it is a means to an end, not the end itself. The important work is in the interpretation of the data. This session outlines a highly accurate and efficient approach and provides a case study of the application. 

Government Agency Taxonomy & Text Analytics

Join us for a case study of a taxonomy/text analytics project done at two state agencies. Reamy covers the initial research and planning stage of the project, the integration of text analytics into a SharePoint search application, the taxonomy design issues, the use of entity extraction to power a faceted navigation solution, the use of auto-categorization for subject metadata tagging, and finally, the evaluation of the solution by looking at performance and effort level needed to achieve that accuracy.

Taxonomies are a proven enabler for information discovery as distinct from targeted search. How does one interpret and antic- ipate user needs and intentions when designing an information system? When do they need more options, fewer options, and how can they get reorientated should they go down a blind alley? Clarke explores how taxonomies, metadata, and graph queries can help transcend these design challenges and deliver an exceptionally engaging user experience. 

What if you were tasked with building a new taxonomy every other month? What's it like to design taxonomies that drive adaptive con- tent, across multiple devices, for a variety of clients and uses? The modern approach to the taxonomy process within a digital agency involves many moving parts. Abbott talks about how digital-age taxonomists face the realities of less-than-ideal timelines and the challenges of employing taxonomies for a variety of technology solutions. Find out how taxonomies play into the various spheres of digital brand-building, including content strategy. 

Selecting & Implementing an Auto-Tagging Tool

So you've spent months developing an enterprise taxonomy and now you're facing the daunting task of implementing it and tagging your content. Is an auto-tagging tool right for you, and if so where do you start? Roux walks through the five factors to consider when making this decision: content, taxonomy, existing tools and platforms, internal resources, and timeframe. She draws on her experience creating and implementing taxonomies for organizations like PBS, National Geographic and Gannett and touches on best practices to employ and common pitfalls to avoid. 

Leveraging Automated Classification to Support Metadata & Taxonomy Projects

Get a step-by-step practical guide to metadata discovery and extraction as well as tips and tricks for both initial efforts and ongoing maintenance of metadata processes.

Ever wish you had a team of taxonomists at your disposal to tell you the real truth? Answer your burning questions? We'll put some of the best speakers from the Boot Camp in the hot seat where they'll answer questions you posted during the conference (on Twitter). Esoteric or entertaining, specific or far-reaching; all questions are fair game, as long as they're in the spirit of learning more about taxonomies.