Our experienced speakers cut through the hype and share how new technologies like AI can be used for business benefit and competitive advantage. This facilitated panel discussion describes what technologies are available and how companies can use them. It explains how businesses can put artificial intelligence to work now, in the real world. AI will improve products and processes and make decisions better-informed/important but largely invisible tasks. AI technologies won't replace human workers but augment their capabilities, with smart machines working alongside smart people. AI can automate structured and repetitive work, provide extensive analysis of data through machine learning (“analytics on steroids”), and engage with customers and employees via chatbots and intelligent agents. Get insights and ideas on how to experiment with these technologies, consider the ethics of these technologies,  and use them to revitalize knowledge management in your organization.

For years Synaptica has advised our clients that there are just some things they can’t do with their taxonomies once they migrate them to the SharePoint Term Store. Restrictions within SharePoint prevent much of the richness of thesauri and non-hierarchical relationships from being expressed. Finally, a breakthrough solution has been developed through a joint venture effort between Synaptica and Search Explained. Clarke and Molnar briefly review the common pain points experienced in SharePoint taxonomy implementations, before demonstrating innovative new user experiences that transcend these pain points to deliver a taxonomy-rich search, browse and tagging experience within SharePoint.

Few organizations realize that 80% of their most critical data cannot be handled by business applications because it is unstructured (contracts, emails, customer correspondence…). But the missing piece in this puzzle actually exists: Natural Language Processing (NLP), a form of AI that extracts meaning from documents, thanks to organizational and linguistic knowledge. The outcome is a genuinely knowledgeable application: one that delivers effective search and analytics, accelerates business processes, and enables professionals to focus on the highest added-value parts of their mission. Discover why leading organizations have made NLP a priority and how they are using it to build knowledgeable applications for search, analytics and process automation.

Taxonomies help organize, categorize, and relate content. But before that, you need a model for that content. This session looks at content models from a new angle and how to use taxonomy to bring content to life. A model of the types of content and their relationships reveals the many ways content types can be classified to improve findability. When taxonomies are woven into the fabric of your content, internal search becomes easier to facet and sort, and curation is dynamic and ongoing. It’s a perfect match of content strategy and information architecture. Content models and taxonomies really are BFFs.

The schema.org web vocabulary has emerged as the most important metadata standard for web content, used by Google, Microsoft, Amazon’s Alexa, and many other online platforms. How is schema.org related to enterprise taxonomies? How can taxonomists best utilize features of the schema.org vocabulary to improve the descriptiveness of information published online? Michael explains how the schema.org vocabulary classifies different dimensions of information, and how taxonomists can use the vocabulary, including entity types, properties and different strategies to include taxonomy terms as values. Learn how to provide more precise answers to online queries, whether through search, chat bots, voice bots, or other online channels.

Taxonomies are foundational knowledge organization structures for entire information ecosystems relying on a single source of truth for concepts used in navigation, content tagging, and insight discovery. With increasingly agile and fast-moving taxonomy development and use, it’s easy to neglect the rigor necessary to build a strong foundational taxonomy. Taxonomies without this rigor can easily become ill-fitted for the processes they are meant to support. As with any ecosystem, the early introduction of unwanted elements can have downstream effects. Hear about the often unintended biases introduced during taxonomy building and the subsequent content tagging process, and how to build taxonomies with discipline and rigor using verified sources and strong governance processes.

Some organizations want to apply AI techniques in their efforts to construct taxonomies better and faster. Various AI techniques can produce interesting groupings or clusters of content that are useful for discovery, but not as useful for search. Can AI do any more than produce a good bucket of candidate concepts and show possible meaningful relationships?

Taxonomies are the foundation for controlled vocabularies, which enable enhanced search, categorization and the ongoing development of ontologies. Moving beyond taxonomies and ontologies, however, the development of knowledge graphs starts to add the semantic layer needed to enrich and enhance all types of information. Doane helps us understand how and why to build knowledge graphs, and the benefit your organization can realize.

In 2019, we’re already seeing the impact that voice search, AI, and smart software agents like Alexa and Google Assistant are making on the way information is found and consumed on the web. Through examples drawn from healthcare and government, Fitzgerald illustrates the changes IAs and taxonomists face in the burgeoning age of voice UI and AI and introduces simple techniques attendees can use to advocate for structured content approaches to their work.

While trying to realize the dream of personalized experiences, there has been a stream of brand and customer experience fails that continues to mar the reputation of personalization. Taxonomists and IAs have since begun writing the missing manual for steering clear of such madness. What does it mean to design for personalized UX, and why are information sciences pros well positioned to ride to the rescue? This session will help you lean into your organization’s personalization or martech efforts and take your taxonomy skills in a fresh direction. MacIntyre gives five scenarios in which the skills of taxonomists matter more each day. Patterson and Roux discuss how Salesforce optimized its taxonomy and tagging strategy in order to enable a more dynamic, targeted, and personalized user experience on salesforce.com.

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!