This is a whirlwind introduction to taxonomy basic principles: the how, the why and what you need to get the job done quickly and correctly. Hear about the standards and references available, as well as the basic building blocks needed to create a well-formed and versatile taxonomy. This session is a good foundation for those new to taxonomy design to help understand the rest of the program. Grab your breakfast and join our expert as she gets you ready for an intensive Taxonomy Boot Camp!

Conference program chair, Stephanie Lemieux, welcomes attendees to the start of Taxonomy Boot Camp 2017!

Ever wonder how—and why—Netflix gets so super- specific with its categories? It may seem like the work of an over-eager editorial staff. In actuality, it’s a highly deliberate—and heavily tested—tag-based taxonomy, designed to suit 100 million users and scale for any movie or TV show in the world. Hastings delves into one of the company’s more successful experiments in merchandising, and reveals the editorial strategies involved in putting a human face on its seemingly infinite, algorithmic personalization.

People are at the core of knowledge-sharing—the key to high functioning organizations. In John Seely Brown’s words, “We participate, therefore we are.” New and emerging technology can only enhance learning, sharing, and decision making to create successful organizations. Join our inspiring and knowledgeable speaker as he shares his view of the future of people and tech working together to share knowledge and create winning organizations.

Text analytics and auto-categorization tend to present themselves to the world as esoteric disciplines supported by complex expert systems. Users are immediately confronted by a jargon-wall built with terminology from computational linguistics, such as “tokenization,” “lemmatization,” and “NLP.” At past KMWorld/Taxonomy Bootcamp events, some practitioners who are attempting to get started with auto-categorization projects have voiced a common set of frustrations. Categorizing content shouldn’t require an advanced degree in linguistics. Categorization rules should be simple and transparent. Rules development and taxonomy development should be coextensive rather than separate activities. Rules should be easy to edit, and it should be possible to understand quickly and precisely how changes to taxonomy and rules impact document categorization. This talk explores these issues from a design and user-experience perspective. It outlines a manifesto for demystifying text analytics and for simplifying the process of auto-categorization. The manifesto is aimed at a constituency of content owners and taxonomists and hopes to help them take ownership of the categorization process so they can better control the search and discovery experience for their end users.