Sharing knowledge for enterprise success requires entrepreneurial skills, new ways of thinking and operating, continuous learning, and change. There are many new tools available to help, but it is the people and the culture of an organization that determines its ultimate success. Wilkinson interviewed 200 of today’s top entrepreneurs, including the founders of Airbnb, LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Yelp, Dropbox, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Chipotle, Under Armour, Spanx, Jetblue, and Revolution Foods, to distill what it takes to go from startup to scale in our rapidly changing economy. As leaders reinvent their approaches to digital transformation for organization survival in this economy, they can learn these fundamental skills, practice them, and pass them on. Join our accomplished researcher and speaker as she shares her framework and provides ways to master the skills that underlie entrepreneurial success.

The information industry is abuzz with excitement about emerging and maturing technologies often grouped under the ubiquitous yet nebulous rubric of AI, or with nascent disruptive technologies such as blockchain, which may be poised to migrate from the confines of cryptocurrencies and cultivate business applications in other diverse activities such as records management. The growth of big data applications has produced a tectonic shift across the information landscape, challenging enterprises to rationalize the collision between information science and data science. Within some industries linked data, ontologies and the semantic web have had a major impact, whereas in other industries these technologies are perceived as academic or over-engineered. Clarke surveys industry trends before honing-in on common practical applications and tools that taxonomists and others need to do their job.

Seneca once noted, “Our plans miscarry because they have no aim,” and yet today, people are building taxonomies without a purpose. Fortunately, we’re seeing resurgence in enterprise information architecture as executives seek to make sense of the mess left behind by a “Move fast and break things” mindset. Is the intent to boost customer satisfaction with more powerful search, browse, and personalization? Is the goal to improve staff productivity by creating infrastructure, standards, and a governance model to align vocabularies and processes? Morville draws upon his experiences with ecommerce and enterprise information architecture projects to illustrate how to plan with purpose, holistically and inclusively.

Hear how Ubisoft developed a strategy to define a new common corporate taxonomy from disparate departmental vocabularies such as KM, MDM and HR. The team defined a minimum metadata standard for high-value content and a method to systematically apply the new taxonomy to high-value content. Discover how they manage and provide access to these taxonomies “as-a-service” in a globally distributed environment and plan to go further in developing a corporate ontology for content auto-classification and recommendation.

The Associated Press (AP) has a robust hierarchical taxonomy built for news, covering more than 230,000 topics, events, people, organizations, and places, as well as an auto-classification system that applies our taxonomy to content. Given the multitude of tags that make it on to a news article, which are the most important? Should the salience of each type of tag be measured the same way? Hear how AP has approached the problem of news classification relevance, ranging from statistical methods for topical multi-label classification and entity salience to mapping of our taxonomy to basic categories.

For the past 3 years, Claussen has worked on a cognitive computing project utilizing IBM’s Watson question-answering capability. The goal was to develop a global data privacy research product across different jurisdictions, legal systems, and customer types. What began as a standard taxonomy exercise developed into a much broader project, for which her skills in content organization, taxonomies, and metadata provided the foundation. Hear concrete recommendations for a taxonomist’s successful involvement in a cognitive computing project.

Organizations across industries are deploying semantically enriched search solutions for unified access to information stored in different repositories, formats, and with differing metadata. This talk describes case studies that demonstrate a practical, scalable process to achieve semantic search enrichment. It employs auto-classification based on machine learning and taxonomies with humans in the loop to efficiently and accurately tag content. This hybrid approach combines the best capabilities of human experts and AI (machine learning) in an integrated, governed process.

Chatbots and other AI infrastructures are dependent on the quality of the questions they receive and the quality of the datasets they are utilizing. Taxonomies and ontologies are essential components in creating high-quality questions and datasets for the chatbot to use. Hear about five different ways Factor used ontology to support a new AI chatbot in question refinement and the information retrieval processes as well as the ways that the requirements of the chatbot influenced the design of the ontology.

As voice command interfaces become more accurate and useful, how does taxonomy play a role in the further development of the invisible interface? How do taxonomy and use of metadata benefit from improved AI? How do taxonomists rethink the user functionality and cognitive load? The answer may come from the worlds of linguistics and metadata. Doane reviews current knowledge and proposes initial solutions for using a taxonomy in the new age of the voice command interface, including some real-world examples of building taxonomies in voice command software.

Interested in industry trends? Stymied by a taxonomy design challenge at work? Bring your toughest, crunchiest taxonomy issues and challenges to our panel of seasoned, full-time taxonomists, who compete to answer your questions with insight, entertainment, and perhaps even controversy! The best questions (as voted by the audience) will bring home prizes!