Taxonomies are an important (yet sometimes under-rated) part of the information architecture discipline. These two talks from Marc and Emma give valuable insights into managing your content so that your users (whether internal or external) can effortlessly find their way around. The talks cover tools such as AI, as well as methodologies for making your website navigation work well.

This session fits perfectly with our conference theme of ‘Making taxonomies go further’. Alex provides an overview of how to model a taxonomy which can be later extended with an ontology. This can enable, for example, better chatbots and automated question and answer applications. Heather shows the various ways that taxonomies are now an essential part of building a great search interface, because they help in supporting relevance, results grouping and faceted search results, among other uses.

Many organisations have technical and business challenges when it comes to managing large and growing volumes of data. Yonah details how she worked across HBO to implement a global standard for language metadata. Katharine of Hackney Council presents a case study, showing how applying a taxonomy to the council's repository of Freedom of Information requests has made it easier for requesters to see if their issue has already been raised.

This session deals with everything from digital assets to research information, yet many of the information management challenges are common to all. Theresa is an expert in digital asset management systems (DAMs), and focuses on metadata migration, especially in DAMs where metadata on image, video and audio assets is essential to reusability. Gerard discusses managing change in knowledge organisation systems – essential for keeping them useful and relevant. Valerie showcases an initiative which uses a repository of shared and agreed terminology to help academics manage and share research information more efficiently.

For beginners, it can be daunting to get started in building and using taxonomies. This session will help those who are starting from the ground up. Leslie describes a methodology adapted from journalism in which asking the right questions at the outset leads to better stakeholder understanding. Janet is a volunteer working on image tagging for a small charity with no budget, so is well placed to show how important it is to get the basics right.

Taxonomies and ontologies that are well-implemented have the potential to revolutionise knowledge discovery, whether for publicly available Linked Data, or for information shared within specialist domains. Jim’s talk is an easy-to-follow walkthrough of creating a query and connecting it to entities from remote Linked Data sources, and using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to publish and access Linked Data. Julia and Sukaina explore how involving diverse stakeholders in taxonomy development is leading to more standardised use of terminology across the climate change and disaster risk reduction domains.

One of the most important applications for taxonomies is in enabling information in different places to be found, shared and understood. Denis’s case study covers the EU’s Publication Office’s use of taxonomies stored in a VocBench implementation, in order to manage publications created in all the EU’s official languages. Heather introduces the SKOS standard – an essential standard to know about for anyone working with knowledge organisation systems. Finally, Andreas also details how taxonomies can help across diverse data sources; in this case, legacy silos such as relational databases.

This session is dedicated to getting more out of enterprise search, and is a chance to hear from two very experienced search evangelists. Jason shows that good search is like cooking, in that it takes of variety of ingredients plus skills to produce the right dish for your users, and will cover real-world examples from enterprise and cognitive search. Tony presents a new paradigm for formulating search queries. It uses ontologies and semantic relationships to allow users to move beyond simple text boxes or traditional query builders.