Tuesday, October 16, 2012

This interactive session starts by building a solid conceptual foundation for taxonomy creation and then reinforces concepts through audience participation. Starting with the basics we quickly advance to where and how to leverage taxonomies. This gives beginning and intermediate practitioners a good overview of the foundational knowledge for the more advanced sessions throughout the conference. We cover the taxonomy standards for the key components of a thesaurus. We explore how those elements support the information needs of users from multiple perspectives. Examining illustrative sites and behind-the-scenes solutions, we see how a well constructed taxonomy with a rich interplay of terms and synonyms leads to better information access. Then we turn to developing a taxonomy that serves users, respecting their needs for specialized vocabularies. Doing the hands on activities attendees gain insight into how a subject area can be viewed, described, and structured. This learn-by-doing session provides the basic knowledge you need to create a taxonomy that suits your needs.

The resemblance between a taxonomy and a living tree is more than superficial. Much like a maple or oak must receive nutrients from the earth, a taxonomy is a living and breathing system that must be actively managed or it will wither. Learn how to provide proper care and maintenance of your taxonomy during all stages of growth—from learning how to till the soil (explaining taxonomy to lay audiences) to germination (how to create meaningful facets and structures) to succession planting (taxonomy's role in the broader information ecosystem) to developing a grower's guide (how to diagnose and remediate issues) to the final stage of bearing fruit (metrics to explain the impact of taxonomy). Each of these phases is illustrated through brief case studies and industry best practices.

Guiding Others Through the Maze: Working With Stakeholders to Build a Taxonomy

Whether you're a full-time employee or a consultant, creating a taxonomy is a collaborative effort that involves people who don't know anything about taxonomies. Reviews and feedback can be constructive and useful if we help others learn what they need to know to collaborate on taxonomies. As the resident expert, you can build the initial taxonomy, but you need to guide others through the review process as well as through understanding how a taxonomy will look and how it should work. Theresa Putkey discusses collaboratively building taxonomies and teaching others enough taxonomy basics to be effective reviewers and users, and shares some challenges and ways to overcome them.

Taxonomy in Practice: Navigating Content, EA, SharePoint, and Politics

In theory, creating an enterprise taxonomy is a clear undertaking with good justifications. There are known techniques to extract the information, ANSI guidelines, and commercial tools. And since companies rarely have taxonomists on board, it's a dream for consultants. In practice, a lot of things can go bump in the dark, and this talk exposes some of these challenges and recommends some approaches: Content is everywhere and is inconsistent—it may be hard to surface at first, but then it doesn't stop coming out of the woodwork; subject matter experts are sometimes reluctant to contribute, since it doesn't make them money immediately and it adds to their workload; you're stepping over a lot of toes with IT, business system owners, and enterprise architects; and you have to deal with various arcane systems, as well as with the panacea of the decade, SharePoint. Get some clear, experience-based recommendations on how to handle these challenges and make a positive impact through taxonomy work.

Discussion, Questions & Answers

This popular session facilitates a conversation with a panel of full-time taxonomists from the public and private sectors and consulting world. The taxonomists discuss their career paths, daily activities, and noted trends in the industry. The audience has the opportunity to ask questions, with answers and different perspectives provided by each panelist.

Metadata contains critical information about knowledge assets—the who, what, when, where and why for each item. This information is provided to meet certain needs. In general these needs boil down to findability—“better search” for discovering existing knowledge and “better processes” for creating new knowledge. Dublin Core is the nickname for ISO standard 15836 that specifies a small set of 15 resource descriptors that almost anyone can understand. It has become the de-facto standard for descriptive metadata to identify assets on the web. This workshop focuses on a few metadata fields that are key for interoperability—various types of Dates, Roles and Topics—and the relationships between them. It discusses how to model Dublin Core and other relationships using RDF triples. It describes how to implement metadata methods for tagging knowledge assets with metadata in KM systems such as SharePoint and how to automate tag management using workflow and categorization tools.

A workshop on text analytics development that covers how to develop advanced categorization capabilities, how to add a level of sophistication to extraction of entities from unstructured text, and how to develop the right kind of taxonomy for a text analytics project. Text analytics combined with taxonomies has a lot to offer to enhance semantic applications ranging from enterprise search to social media applications. However, combining taxonomies and text analytics has implications for the design and development of both elements, from favoring smaller, more modular taxonomies to fulfilling the promise of taxonomies by automating the application of taxonomies to documents. This workshop covers all you need to know to add text analytics to semantic applications. It covers the basic analytic techniques from machine learning to sophisticated rule building, surveys the vendor space of text analytics, offers an evaluation process of the right text analytics software for your organization, discusses the role of taxonomies in text analytics development and the implications for the structure of taxonomies, offers an iterative development process, and identifies issues and how to overcome them.

Social Semantic Web for the Enterprise

The importance and nuances of human interaction are often de-emphasized when focusing on automatic generation of semantic markup, which results in dissatisfied users and unrealized return on investment. The Social Semantic Web (s2w) reaches beyond the search box to transport us from a collection of hyperlinks to meaningful, real-time knowledge sharing. It facilitates the fluid transition of meaningful information from the source to the user. As users consistently qualify the value of information sets through the act of selection, they are the de facto stakeholders of the s2W. Employers are the ultimate beneficiaries with a better-informed, more-decisive workforce, one not achieved with an IT miracle technology, but by improved human-computer interactions. Sarah will discuss the planning, development, and maintenance stages for components of a semantic system while emphasizing the necessity of an s2w for the enterprise. Identification of risks and variables associated with layering the successful implementation of a semantic system are also modeled.

Improving the CPSC’s Enterprise Taxonomy, Collaboration, & Knowledge Flows

In 2011, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) launched a public online database enabling Americans to search and report against the safety of consumer products. The launch of this database required coordination and modernization of CPSC's IT framework. A large component of this modernization related to centralizing multiple silo systems, the development of an enterprise taxonomy, improving knowledge flows throughout the Commission, and the shift in collaboration between inter-Commission departments, presenting a challenge in organizational culture and change management. Learn how the CPSC improved its enterprise taxonomy, collaboration, and knowledge flows; how the public database system has become a critical part of staff operations and enables CPSC to gather more and better data from the beginning; how it processes and interprets that data more quickly and makes pertinent information available to the public more rapidly than ever before.

Using Taxonomy to Build a Better Knowledge Tool

What happens if you implement SharePoint, Web 2.0 tools, and enterprise search and people still can't find what they're looking for? This is exactly the situation encountered within the Procurement & Analytic Solutions unit of A.T. Kearney. Deployment of these tools went smoothly, functioning as expected for the most part. Yet confusion remained high and usage low. To address these issues, all knowledge-sharing tools were streamlined into a single system. The Single Place of Knowledge (SPOK) unifies all A.T. Kearney knowledge tools and different types of content—wiki pages, podcasts, case studies, templates and documents—into one entity. The SPOK isn't just about the technical integration of knowledge tools—it is about using a comprehensive taxonomy as the architectural driver. A.T. Kearney presenters outline how SPOK was architected, a taxonomy developed, as well as how change management helped to drive adoption of the tool and the lessons learned along the way.

Knowledge Sharing & Collaboration in the U.S. Army Medical Command

This session explores how the Enterprise Collaboration Initiative devised a program to improve search transparency, secure privacy information, manage records in line with federal guidelines, and classify content to achieve more effective management of all unstructured knowledge assets across the enterprise. Learn how the right technology allows the U.S. Army Medical Command to create, test, deploy, and maintain enterprise taxonomies, vocabularies, and SharePoint Term Sets of Military Health Metadata to standardize the classification of documents and policy application on an enterprise-wide level while making information retrieval more accurate, more global, and more relevant.

Discussion, Questions & Answers

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.