Synonyms (variants, alternate labels, non-preferred terms) help to gather similar content in a single place and to bring your users to that place. But how many synonyms should a concept (term, topic, category) have? Too many synonyms waste effort and create clutter (mess, disorder, confusion) while too few lead to missed opportunities. So how many are desirable, appropriate, or ideal? The speakers debate the case for creating more or fewer synonyms by using real examples from Cengage Learning taxonomies.

A Boston-based financial management company successfully established a culture of proactive stewardship across the firm, transforming governance from crisis management into a core business practice. Learn how you can make governance meaningful to stakeholders, identify and promote the correct investments in taxonomy quality, establish accountability at the correct levels (for business and IT), create a programmatic approach for operationalizing insights, and establish sustainability at the business unit level. Participants have the opportunity to explore numerous artifacts and deliverables that got the job done once and (potentially) forever.

How do you create and maintain a taxonomy or thesaurus with limited staff? Challenges to getting a thesaurus created are discussed as well as how it is maintained after creation. Hear about how to train other staff, how to be the sole “owner” of the thesaurus, and how to advocate for the usage of the taxonomy/thesaurus within your organization.

A well-designed business function classification needs to reflect changing business processes and functions in the organization. Developing a set of guiding principles and business rules to assist those who are tasked to govern the scheme is important to maintain the classification. Learn how the WSDOT developed its business function classification and how it fits within WSDOT’s core metadata framework and enterprise search strategy.

Taxonomy is essential in organizing information and delivering knowledge. But applying it at scale would be a challenge without automation. Cognitive technology fills this gap by providing the connective tissue that aligns content, metadata, and taxonomy. But the impact of cognitive goes well beyond automation. It transforms a traditionally manual process that is fraught with collaboration difficulties into an efficient, organic workflow that lets taxonomists coordinate their work with subject matter experts and curators to save time and avoid errors. It also supports them throughout the taxonomy lifecycle by constantly learning from content and human feedback to adapt to change and simplify taxonomy creation and maintenance. This session showcases the latest developments in these areas and provides a comprehensive view of the workflow benefits deriving from cognitive.

Taxonomies are an essential component of most digital migrations and redesigns, but the end result often does not meet expectations. Learn how migrations can be orchestrated to more effectively leverage taxonomy. Hobbs draws upon experience from planning transformations of large government and global sites to information-heavy, medium-sized websites such as research institutions. Hobbs covers examples of using metrics to realign a central taxonomy and techniques to automatically apply a revised taxonomy to existing content, as well as methods of tracking manual progress where automation is not possible.

This talk addresses two questions: “How can the quality of taxonomies be defined?” and “How can it be measured?” See how quality criteria vary depending on how a taxonomy is applied, such as automatic content classification in ecommerce or a knowledge graph for data integration in enterprises. Distinguish between formal quality, structural properties, content coverage, and network topology. Investigate the advantages of standards-based and machine-processable SKOS taxonomies to be able to measure the quality of taxonomies automatically, as well as several tools and techniques for quality assessment.

The goal of taxonomy validation is to provide persuasive evidence that the taxonomy is effective in meeting project goals. Taxonomy effectiveness can be measured in terms of search recall and precision against a test collection or completeness and consistency in indexing a test collection. Busch discusses a taxonomy validation method that was developed to provide incremental evidence of search effectiveness in a healthcare setting during an extended development process using increasingly sophisticated walk-throughs based on use cases gathered from query logs, literature reviews, and internal and external user interviews.

Phillips introduces the concept of maneuver strategy that combines speed, agility, and innovation which he believes should be the pinnacle of corporate strategy today. The three maneuver strategies—preemption, dislocation, and disruption—can be used at any level of planning and can definitely help you hack KM! Get insights and ideas from many real-world examples and be prepared to hack or innovate your organization!

We need to move beyond fundamentally well-informed taxonomies toward taxonomies that are informed by user needs by incorporating user research into taxonomy design. By learning how to do basic, up-to-date research and analyzing it using a rigorous framework, we can confidently gather evidence of user needs and support a fundamental shift from well-informed collections of headings to building taxonomies that reflect the reality of user experience. Learn basic steps for conducting research (including establishing research objectives, determining research questions, and choosing participants), basic steps for rigorous analysis (including clustering methods and developing thesis statements), and examples of using evidence from research to make taxonomy design decisions.

Taxonomists can play a variety of roles, and XO Group collocates taxonomists and data scientists within the same team so that both the human and machine elements of classification work side-by-side. This discussion delves into why taxonomists and data scientists should work together and how taxonomies can integrate and improve the effectiveness of data science solutions.

The Art of Facilitating & Communicating Taxonomy

Effective taxonomy efforts have a great deal to do with the “softer side” of design. The art of taxonomy design includes communications and facilitation, leveraging an array of approaches. Wahl covers the keys to discussing, communicating, and facilitating taxonomy design efforts. He offers proven approaches and best practices to ensure your taxonomy design efforts engage end users properly and get them invested in the benefits and outcomes of the taxonomy design effort.

Managing Technology: The Value of Passion and Good Timing

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