Taxonomies can improve search by increasing the precision and recall of relevant results, but taxonomies also offer other benefits beyond the confines of search. Taxonomies enable people to browse and discover information they might not otherwise have known existed. This talk looks at a number of examples of how taxonomies can be visualized and how visualization is the key to information discovery.

This practical, in-depth session provides an overview of the different components of taxonomy projects and discusses the different aspects of designing and building taxonomies to meet the needs of different enterprise applications such as search, tagging, navigation, content management, and auto-categorization. Carlson illustrates with real-world examples and provides tested guidelines for designing and implementing your taxonomies.

This discussion focuses on an overarching vision for an enterprise taxonomy which guided the development and management of one organization's taxonomy. It provides clear examples of the value of the vision and specifics about how the vision tied into the management process. Insights include managing taxonomy as its own asset (defining the classifications and the values used within those classifications), using appropriate systems of record to define the set of values used for a particular classification; and enabling monitoring of changes to the taxonomy values by content managers. For more details and tips on how to adopt a vision to guide what a taxonomy is intended to be and how it should be managed and governed, join our experienced practitioner as he shares techniques and practices that you can use in your organization.

SNC-Lavalin, one of the world's largest engineering and construction firms, has the difficult task of managing information to capitalize on this asset to become more efficient in knowledge transferability. For example, gathering a repository of proposals, qualifications, and exemplary work products is difficult because people are too busy "getting the work done." This session discusses a project to design and implement an enterprise-wide taxonomy framework applicable across corporate, divisional and project organizational levels; in a global multilingual context; and extendable beyond the traditional Intranet to also be relevant to other information systems (project management, records management, financial management, and knowledge transfer and sharing). They share the challenges and lessons learned in building an enterprise wide taxonomy framework, and implementing business unit portals as well as company-wide content type-based collection like quality management procedures and related documents.

While everyone agrees that taxonomies are critical to effective document and web content management, useful portals, and good search results, as well as essential to proper records management, many of us are struggling to understand the difference between our public-facing taxonomies and our internal enterprise taxonomies. This session explores the similarities and differences of these types of taxonomies and looks at how they are integrated with various content technology applications.

In the early days of KM, there was a flurry of taxonomy building to provide a basic foundation for knowledgebases and knowledge representation. These early models were usually built on traditional library science classification schemes that proved to be too rigid and cumbersome for rich knowledge-based projects, particularly for capturing and/or supporting know-how, and there was a reaction against the whole approach. However, the new capabilities in text analytics of taxonomies coupled with categorization, entity and fact extraction, and sentiment analysis offer a much richer platform for KM projects. Expertise is always a combination of know-how and know-what, and the new text analytics provides a way to model and support both. It is time to take another look at taxonomies/text analytics and KM. Our speaker, a leading expert in text analytics and long time KM practitioner, discusses the basic text analytics capabilities, how those capabilities are typically developed, explores how they provide a foundation for KM that includes more advanced knowledgebases, more powerful expertise location applications, and support for richer and more flexible collaboration initiatives.

Make plans to join us for a special networking and community building event using tools from knowledge management, taxonomy, and search. Open to all conference attendees, speakers, and sponsors.

In this case study, Ambur offers a practitioner's view of how her team pursues its goal of providing effective search for the thousands of researchers and engineers at NASA Langley.This user base found itself confounded by the multitude of options both for information — with hundreds of internal and external sources of web sites, databases, document repositories, scholarly journals, and image collections --- and in search interfaces, which had driven it to the open web and inferior results. This talk explores the decision to deploy Google Search Appliance internally as an effort to meet user expectations of easy-to-use search that provides unified information access. Ambur will cover the challenges faced, strategies undertaken, and ongoing team work required to deliver targeted results within a secure framework to achieve the goal of effective information mining enabling NASA mission success.

We frequently hear of design patterns for data models; many of us have reference books on our shelves that are full of them. Similar design patterns emerge in the creation of taxonomies, thesauri, and especially ontologies. Patterns allow us to more efficiently work with our data, predict query and analysis outcomes, and provide a benchmark we can test against. In the first presentation, speakers share their experiences modeling controlled vocabularies with semantic relations, as well as best practices regarding identifying patterns, building models, adding relationships to concepts, reuse and repurposing of models, and modifying models. Sehon focuses on challenges involved in revising taxonomies that differ from those faced in creating taxonomies from scratch. The User/Custodian Complacency challenge deals with a fear of thinking outside the box. People say, "It's how we have always done it," "My users already search this way," or, "It's too hard to train, so let's just keep the taxonomy as is.'' Of course, this creates more problems than it solves. The Lack of Stakeholder Buy-In challenge addresses the difficulties in changing customs and habits. Many times, these stakeholders see change as a waste of time. The Misunderstanding or Lack of Understanding of the Purpose and Function of Taxonomies challenge is important in the efficient retrieval of information, more relevant search results, and in organizing documents and other data. These challenges create barriers to taxonomy development and evolution that lead to stress and frustration for the taxonomy specialist during vocabulary maintenance. She uses concrete examples to illustrate the challenges and provides techniques and steps for addressing them.

The first presentation discusses the design and implementation of a standardized taxonomy to bridge content and publications from seven projects operated by the Pew Research Center (PRC). Hear their experience with content management systems and taxonomies and how the finalized vocabulary was applied to all internal and external PRC content for tagging, categorization, and metadata creation for search appliance crawlers and XML feeds to content aggregrators. The second presentation focuses on best practices and lessons learned from the enterprise web platform redesign projects at two U.S. government agencies. It illustrates how these platforms are powerful tools hinged on taxonomies that enable more transparent, accountable and effective client-oriented government with content categorization compliant with government mandates. Take away a working methodology for defining content categorization; the key elements that helped ensure an intuitive classification and categorization schema for these agencies; as well as the legal, compliance, organizational and technical steps that these agencies are taking to validate their taxonomies in a manner that is consistent with regulatory and business requirements

This session describes a large global enterprise deployment of SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite as a single platform for the management and publication of a network of both centrally managed and business unit taxonomies.  The solution enables corporate level governance for the use and management of taxonomies and controlled vocabularies; and is integrated through the company's SOA architecture providing access to terminology and relationships through easy to use web interfaces.

The Enterprise Solutions Showcase will feature the top companies in the KM, CM, search, taxonomy, and intranets marketplace, offering attendees an opportunity to explore all of the latest in product and service solutions. If you are looking for a particular product, evaluating competing systems, or keeping up with the latest trends and developments, be sure to visit the Enterprise Solutions Showcase.