The ideal starting point for those with little or no experience in creating taxonomies or descriptive metadata. Heather is the author ofThe Accidental Taxonomist, one of the most important and useful books available in this field. The workshop gives attendees an overview of the definitions, types, examples, use cases and standards for taxonomies and metadata. It then covers planning and designing, and best practice in taxonomy creation. The workshop includes interactive exercises so that attendees can try out the concepts and take their first steps into the world of taxonomy development.

Tom is one of our industry’s leading advocates for the power of using text analytics to drive better classification of documents and content. He is the author of Deep Text, an essential manual on the subject. Taxonomy provides the structure for text analytics, but they do not work in isolation. This workshop covers everything attendees need to start applying taxonomies to automated text analysis, including skills, development processes, software and data-driven applications. It also introduces content modelling, a key process in defining how content will be structured and tagged.

Patrick is a highly-experienced practitioner and educator on knowledge organisation, and his workshop provides attendees with a deep dive into making a business case for taxonomies. Sometimes this can be the most arduous part of a taxonomy project, so it is critical to have the right framework to approach senior stakeholders and budget-holders. Patrick shows how to determine the pain points that taxonomies can solve; how to link your taxonomy work to business objectives; how to identify success criteria and finally, how to prepare that all-important business case or pitch.

It’s always been true that taxonomists don’t just work with taxonomies. Ontologies, and increasingly knowledge graphs, are also important tools in our armoury. Ahren is a long-established expert on building different kinds of knowledge models. His workshop takes attendees through the end-to-end process of building a knowledge graph, a model made up of entities which have defined and named relationships between them. Topics covered include planning, technologies and implementation strategies.

Whatever kind of taxonomy you are working with, the choices of label are absolutely crucial. Ambiguity, hidden context, multiple meanings and unconscious bias may all come into play for the unwary taxonomist. This strategic, down-to-earth talk will help you make good choices.

As taxonomists, many of us have experience of building out different kinds of knowledge organisation systems (KOS), and now knowledge graphs are another tool in our toolbox. Dave explores the role of the KOS in an accessible and straightforward way. He puts KOS in the broader context of knowledge graphs and their component taxonomies, metadata and data.

This session can't answer every possible question on information retrieval or taxonomy software, but it contains essential, basic information for anybody looking to get up to speed on these core areas. Jonathan outlines a framework for using the power of taxonomies (and other knowledge models) to improve both automatic tagging and search. Heather gives an experienced practitioner's overview of some of the main considerations in selecting software to manage a taxonomy, including data migration, feature comparison and autotagging.

In order to explain the finer points of taxonomies, ontologies and information architecture to non-expert clients or stakeholders, you need a few skills. The ability to articulate business benefits or to tell a persuasive story, for example. Madi shares some of her secrets, gleaned from years of experience with all sorts of stakeholders. Mary's case study is an ongoing ‘quest' to convince people with power and budgets to invest in taxonomies and the AI and machine learning technologies that leverage them. 

Without the validation process, a taxonomy may quickly become untrusted and unused. Thomas Alexander was the inaugural winner of our Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year award at Boot Camp in 2018. He returns to share more of his experiences of working to validate a taxonomy that is used by Cancer Research UK for a SharePoint implementation, as well as their external web taxonomy. Bob outlines how the validation phase of a taxonomy project is crucial to mediating a dialogue between the taxonomist and the various stakeholders and consumers of their work.

A packed session of case studies showcasing the state-of-the-art in automatic tagging. Jeremy Tarling presents the BBC’s journey towards fully automated annotation of content in order to drive future audience experiences. Jason details how organisations are exploiting automation of taxonomies and tagging to make search better. Tommaso shows how concept extraction helped the BMJ build subject collections from the content of their family of over 50 journals. Finally, Jeremy Bentley will discuss leveraging AI and semantic technologies.

Information professionals know that successful enterprise search is not merely about a piece of technology. Charlie is an established expert; his talk describes three aspects of search quality, including how to measure and improve it and tools for doing so. Karen is an inhouse search manager with a proven track record of improving search experience for customers. Her case study covers the full gamut of what is needed, from understanding the role of search within the customer journey to creating a long-term, iterative focus on search.

Blockchain has become a big discussion topic over the last year or so, and yet it is still a challenge for information professionals to get their heads around the potential, and the downsides. This session features speakers who have spent a great deal of time investigating it, and offer two easy-to-follow surveys of the landscape. Rob and Jon use visuals and step-by-step guides to look at the potential use of Distributed Ledger Technologies. Marc and Noeleen’s talk is a no-nonsense analysis of the technical and practical aspects of Blockchain, and includes real-world examples.

This session features two highly-regarded and published experts of the information community. ‘People search’, based on structured content, is an increasingly important feature of many digital workspaces. Martin discusses the role of tagging in enhancing the findability of individuals' expertise and skills. Tom’s talk describes the exciting, (re-)emerging discipline of content modelling - breaking up content into sections that can be analysed more accurately by text analytics and other applications.

An essential session for anyone working with taxonomies in SharePoint, Randy draws on his own experiences of migration projects, to offer tips and tricks on all aspects of migration, from taxonomies and metadata, to user experience and content. Ahren and Agnes present a case study of a custom-built UI which can add taxonomy management features such as related terms and polyhierarchy to the native SharePoint Term Store.

Join us for an informal drinks reception at the end of Boot Camp’s first day. Hosted by organisers, Information Today, all welcome.

Following the conference reception you’re invited to join industry associations ISKO UK, SLA Europe and SLA Taxonomy Division from 18.45 onwards at an informal networking evening at The Hand and Flower pub, 1 Hammersmith Road, London W14 8XJ (opposite Olympia). All welcome.

Data ethics has justifiably become one of the hottest topics in technology. It is more important than ever that our community demand that information is created and managed according to ethical objectives, and with an awareness of the risk of bias. Nick is in the vanguard of industry efforts to address the implications of bias in structured information, and his talk is a wide-ranging overview of what our profession can do about it.

Nominated by you, and highlighting the very best practitioners and organisations working with taxonomies today, we will be presenting Awards to the winners of:

The taxonomies managed by the presenters in this session both contain hundreds of terms. These are not trivial things to maintain. Anton shares his knowledge of making his work visible and respected throughout the organisation, ensuring that the value of his efforts to keep the taxonomy relevant is widely understood. Alan represents SAGE Research, the first winners of our Taxonomy Success of the Year award last year. His case study covers the work they did to collaborate with users in its development, and the innovations it drives, such as voice-powered navigation via an Alexa skill.

Whatever excuse you’ve ever heard in your organisation not to invest in a taxonomy, our speakers have probably heard it too. Maura draws on her experiences of a wide range of stakeholders (some harder to please than others!). She shares insights on aligning a taxonomy project to business goals; measuring and communicating value; and building up evidence through research and prototyping. Zabair shows how adopting intelligent content services with flexible taxonomies improves the discovery and value of content.

Taxonomists tend to wear different hats, interact with a wide range of people, and work with many different technologies. This session is thought-provoking and encourages attendees to push forward the boundaries of their knowledge. Joyce talks about her experiences with open-source taxonomy and ontology tools including VocBench, Protege and TemaTres. These tools offer rich functionality but can have steep learning curves. Next, Patrick describes the five horizons of taxonomy work - Words, Structure, Value, Orchestration and Governance - that everybody who works with taxonomies should try to master.

Taxonomies which are applied to massive volumes of content or product data don’t look after themselves. Marisa manages a taxonomy which is over 40 years old and is applied to nearly 5 million pieces of psychology content. She discusses how she keeps the taxonomy up to date with the latest research, terminology and ever-evolving user needs. Marc shares Etsy’s process of iterative taxonomy development, which ensures that the 60 million items in the inventory continue to be accurately tagged and managed.

Public sector organisations are almost notorious for the volume and variety of data they create and store. This session’s speakers work with, and for, public sector bodies in Canada and Scotland respectively. Leslie describes her methodology for designing taxonomies for government. Peter, who is heavily involved in public sector data sharing initiatives, gives an update on the W3C Data Catalogue Vocabulary (DCAT), which was originally developed by government linked data working groups from all over the world.

Whether or not you’re working in healthcare, semantic data is an exciting growth area and this session delivers two expertly-told case studies. Alexandre describes how a huge multilingual ontology of clinical language has become a vital driver of search, automatic translation, a knowledge graph and more. Bharat shows how NHS Digital is working to map national and local taxonomies, to bring consistent understanding of medical concepts to many parts of the NHS.

Things have moved on from a few years ago when developments in search technology were apparently going to make taxonomies obsolete. Nowadays, cutting-edge organisations are blending the best of different approaches, to try and best serve their customers. These two case studies show how this is done. Monica outlines Elsevier’s multi-disciplinary project to use taxonomies, entity extraction and curated indexing rules. Pedro and George describe Farfetch’s project to build a knowledge graph of fashion information to enhance search relevancy and personalisation.

More and more organisations are realising the potential benefits of using taxonomies and ontologies in information systems. Ian presents three case studies, in which taxonomies were used for classification, for underpinning a knowledge graph and for online card sorting tools. James is an experienced ontology practitioner, and his talk covers tools developed so that subject matter experts in life sciences can contribute to ontologies used in search and machine learning models, among other things.

Along with data ethics and Blockchain, knowledge graphs are one of the most-discussed and hyped topics in technology. This session shows the reality beyond the buzzwords, drawing on case studies from cutting-edge companies in engineering, transport, manufacturing and video gaming. Sebastian talks from his experience of helping companies use PoolParty for large-scale knowledge graph implementations. Aaron brings deep expertise from his role at EA, introducing a knowledge graph based on linked data and taxonomies, to enable multichannel content publishing.

Many organisations have, or use, more than one taxonomy. Therefore interoperability is an important aspiration so that they can link and exploit the connections between concepts and systems. Heather gives a quick-fire introduction to knowledge graphs for those who need it, then Denis and Anikó present the case study of an EU body which uses VocBench to handle mapping managing and sharing of multiple taxonomies in a variety of languages.