Information systems need to be organized in order to make sense of their contents—and as collections of information of all types have grown exponentially, it has become essential to improve these organization schemes. Classification and categorization projects can incur significant costs, so it’s important to understand why you need such an effort and then how to choose the best way to reach your objective of making information findable. Sue Feldman discusses the state of the art of enriching information and outlines coming challenges, which include understanding and then mimicking the subtle ways that people interact with information, so that they can discover not only the known, but the unknown.

Get ready, get set to develop a taxonomy by first understanding what is meant by a taxonomy, including the many current variations.
Next, you will need to understand and choose:

• Your major strategy options, such as whether it will be a subject or organizational outline.
• Underlying standards and technologies for creation, such as manual adoption and revision, or automatic.
• The basic building blocks for taxonomies, from the hierarchical view down to term records.

After outlining these requirements, you will be prepared to evaluate the pros and cons based on practical and realistic expectations. 

Hear two taxonomists describe their solution to effective knowledge sharing and the need for a multilingual, controlled vocabulary that was flexible enough to fit the structure of their organization. Learn how and why they developed an enterprisewide taxonomy strategy, including the processes and techniques used to develop the global taxonomy and local extensions (both geographic and by language), the adoption and implementation of the taxonomy, and the vocabulary management software tools that were critical to the successful enablement of their taxonomy strategy.

Learn about the work involved in a huge project that pulls together the various other “lists” that were owned throughout the Home Office into a taxonomy, which is being integrated with all the departments’ IT systems. The taxonomy will also be used on the company’s intranet and its Internet Web site to allow the general public to find government information. The project involved collaboration with information professionals, IT teams, consultants, and civil servants who just wanted to find things!

Implementing a taxonomy project can be a challenging task, but knowing what to do and why helps tremendously. It is critical to make the right design decisions up front in order to implement your project properly and in the right direction. This session explores fundamental considerations and examines taxonomy technologies, tools, software, and vendors so you can make well-informed design decisions for your project. You will learn:

• About different types of taxonomies and how they can be used.
• Why some applications use manual classification when others are automated.
• When to use an existing taxonomy and when to build your own.
• What other resources can be used to assist taxonomy creation.
• About technologies that may be used to create, customize, and maintain taxonomies.
• Strengths and weaknesses of the different technologies.
• Which taxonomy software vendors use which technology.
• Which taxonomy software is best for your project.

 

What are the steps in deriving a taxonomy? Where do you start? What questions do you ask? What are the best sources for terms? How are they arranged into the actual taxonomy? In this session, you will learn the tactics of taxonomy derivation—the specific process steps that you need to go through to get to your end result. Seth Earley and Wendi Pohs will discuss user interviews, types of questions to ask, working session techniques, work task analysis, content analysis, how taxonomy terms can be pulled from process maps, ways of understanding patterns and themes, and how to think about metadata fields versus taxonomy term values. You will leave this session with a clear understanding of how to derive your taxonomy.

Effective taxonomies are not carved in stone. They must be modified based on changes in content, user needs, and budgeting realities. Developing a taxonomy in an incremental fashion requires that we can measure how well it is working in order to plan its next version. How is that done? In this session, you will learn:

• Tagging just enough content to see if it works is a good first step to test taxonomies, but how much content is enough for validation?
• What other approaches have been shown to be effective, such as open and closed card sorting, use-based scenario testing, and focus groups?
• How to evaluate test results, what they mean, and what corrective steps can be taken.

 

After an organization has developed and deployed taxonomies, how do you keep them, and the associated metadata, updated to reflect all the changes in and around the organization? What kind of a team is needed for maintenance, what skills and tools do they need, and what governance processes should they follow, including:

• What are the sources that require changes, such as organizational change, SME input, end-user feedback, and tagging difficulties?
• What are the two fundamental processes every organization should implement to maintain metadata and taxonomies?
• What team structures are used in different organizations to manage the changes to their taxonomies?

 

Taxonomies and the entire area of organizing information are evolving rapidly. Entity extraction, tagging, and a dozen other ways to categorize are coming to the forefront. Listen to this panel of experts reach beyond the tactical, practical information you’ve heard from them during this conference as they share their blue-sky ideas about what’s on the horizon. Query them about what you heard—and what you didn’t—and gather your insights and lessons learned during this closing panel.