Monday, October 31, 2011

This candid look at three different professional lives builds on a tradition of taking an in-depth first-person dive into the responsibilities, challenges, and opportunities for people who work as full-time taxonomists within large organizations. What are the different challenges they face selling the value of taxonomy? What issues surround software and vendor selection, and how much input do vendors have? This panel talks about how they got their start within their organization, a “typical” work week, and gives examples of recent projects and initiatives. They engage the audience in the discussion and face the perceptions and misconceptions we have about practicing taxonomists.

Surprise is the best validation. Taxonomy developers can’t know what they don’t know, and all taxonomies and taxonomy applications are unique in some way, with their own nuances and custom contexts. It’s important for taxonomists to uncover these details quickly, and this means the unanticipated is business as usual. Besides, surprise is far more useful than general agreement among stakeholders, which often suffers from siloed thinking and political motivations. Seth Maislin shares several real-life, on-the-job surprises (and a few laughs), along with suggestions on how to find surprises of your own.

Taxonomy is a fundamental part of any information architecture. Any organization which needs to make significant volumes of information available in an efficient and consistent way to its customers, partners, or employees needs to understand the value of a serious approach to taxonomy design and management. This session focuses on the process and techniques to develop an enterprisewide taxonomy strategy, organize your data, and improve your search relevancy.

Hundreds of major corporations such as Boeing, NASA, and TVA already employ semantic-based technologies to directly improve the effectiveness of their information systems. Between 35% and 65% of the $300 billion being spent per year on systems integration is attributable to resolving semantic mismatches between systems. Almost all of our newest promising technologies such as web services, XML, business rules, and business intelligence depend on semantics for the success of their implementation. Dave McComb covers three case studies that show how ontologies have been used as the basis for SOA modeling, cross domain searches and semantic wiki and the use of ontologies to support large scale entity extraction.

Join us for drinks and hors d'oeuvres in a relaxed atmosphere. Continue the day's discussions with new colleagues, meet and talk with conference speakers and sponsors, or unwind with old friends after an insightful day of sessions.

The Publications Office of the European Union launched several initiatives to leverage the Office’s controlled vocabularies and indexing tools to facilitate metadata interoperability and access to multilingual government content. One initiative, a taxonomy alignment, aims to improve automatic indexing and re-indexing of existing content, support automatic query expansion, and ultimately, help the Publication Office to join the “Linked Data” community. It uses advanced semantic technologies and is specifically powered by AROMA, INRIA Exmo’s ontology matcher. This talk explains why and how the EU relies on taxonomy alignment to achieve its objectives and covers: the technology behind semantic ontology matching, examples of alignment between various taxonomies and thesauri, manual quality control, and validation of matching relations based on scores.

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Pharmacy’s Communications and Planning Unit has established and is maintaining a web-based digital asset collection. These digital assets are used by the school for web story illustrations, media requests, publications, announcements, and presentations. This session reports on the design and implementation of the metadata scheme for the open source digital assets repository. The scheme needed to include asset metadata about the objects, as well as controlled vocabularies and keywords to describe and categorize them. The taxonomy development process identified image-specific fields that describe the visual image content, going beyond the literal “who, what, where,” to attributes such as number of people, types of scenes, and others that could be considered a more abstract representation of the visual content. The digital assets taxonomy has served the repository very well, meeting the goals to enhance searching for assets and making them easier to manage.

Semantic systems are coming of age, and semantic technologies are being adopted and put to work. But what type of problems are they good at solving? Using case studies from government and enterprise deployments, Jeremy Bentley shares practical lessons learned on how semantic systems are applied to information that is both behind the corporate firewall as well as on the web. He discusses how the benefits of adding semantics to an organization’s existing investment in search and content management are impressive, illustrates the impact of semantic technology on an organization’s information architecture, and looks at the difference between semantic projects for the enterprise and the goal of Web 3.0 (aka the semantic web), the likely path of convergence, as well as the deliverables and value that each step should provide. Bentley concludes with some do’s and don’ts of semantic projects as well as the role of the information professional in such a project.

When implementing a taxonomy management solution, the disadvantages of both custom systems and full-featured vendor solutions can be mitigated by using standards-based software. Software libraries and services with web-based interfaces that support open standards can provide building blocks that enable quicker assembly, implementation, and rollout of a custom solution. DuCharme reviews standards such as ANSI Z39.19, XML, SKOS, and ISO 25964 as well as standards-based free and commercial tools to consider.

Many companies, whether considering further investment in their SharePoint 2007 deployments or planning upgrades to SharePoint 2010, are reviewing their social media strategies. Users are chomping at the bit to deploy and use the new, natively supported social media features in SharePoint 2010. But most administrators do not fully understand the taxonomy and data governance issues within SharePoint that are associated with these kinds of solutions. Christian Buckley walks participants through the taxonomy and governance implications of the social media capabilities within SharePoint 2007 and 2010. He provides information to prepare organizations for these tools, as well as examples on how to approach setting up and managing metadata, aligning these tools with their broader corporate content management strategies, and maintaining manageability of a SharePoint environment through governance.

Marjorie highlights the current state of standards, including SKOS, OWL, and others, as well as their implications for those working on taxonomies, ontologies, or folksonomies.