Users' minds take shortcuts to get through the day. Usually they’re harmless. Even helpful. But what happens when they’re not? Thomas uses real-world examples to identify some particularly harmful biases that frequently lead users to make bad decisions. Hear about some information architecture, content strategy and design choices we can use in our apps, designs, and platforms to redirect or eliminate the impact of those biases. Finally, explore our own biases as practitioners and some methods to prevent our own blind spots from hurting users.

This introductory taxonomy tutorial covers key concepts to get you up-to-speed for the rest of the conference or helps prepare you to take on a role in a taxonomy project. Topics include the various uses and benefits of taxonomies, comparisons, and suitable applications of different types of taxonomies/controlled vocabularies (hierarchical, faceted, thesauri, and ontologies); taxonomy standards; the relationship of taxonomies to metadata; sources for taxonomy concepts; best practices for developing terms and their relationships; and tools for creating and managing taxonomies.

This session provides a glimpse into what qualitative user research for IA looks like. Using actual examples from user interviews, Ingham and Long demonstrate how to unpack what participants are saying and doing and translate these observations to insights and their implications for IA (taxonomies, metadata, navigation, etc.) They discuss strategies for interpreting data and offer tips on formulating findings.

Use cases, user stories, and tasks drive feature development in the agile method by specifying their acceptance criteria. With taxonomy, use cases are often no more than vague functional requirements, such as “the taxonomy should improve content findability.” It is critical that taxonomy requirements be treated with more rigor, defining a sufficient level of detail to be able to accomplish a task. Use cases explicitly show how a taxonomy would improve findability, such as by providing assisted navigation with fly-out, cascading lists. Busch discusses why and how you can develop use cases, using examples from projects, at the start of an information management project to help avoid costly mistakes or unhappy clients when taxonomy deliverables are presented.

The beauty of language is that concepts can be expressed in many ways. The challenge for a researcher is to include all those variations to find all data related to their topic. With the pressures to conform to different standards over time, we need to be certain that information is not lost to researchers by changes in terminology. This quirk came to light during the COVID-19 pandemic: The virus was called by many different names through the course of the pandemic, from very scientific to very casual, to the point of pejorative. This session covers the implications of choosing—or not choosing—taxonomy terms viewed through the lens of censorship.

You've got a new or improved taxonomy and are ready to leverage it by tagging or retagging real information assets. At least some of that tagging will be done by humans, but those humans may have had limited (or no) involvement in the taxonomy development process. How do you ensure that their work fulfills the purposes of the taxonomy and, ultimately, the needs of the organization? Knudtson draws on experience with multiple (very different) real-life tagging efforts and provides best practices in running a (re)tagging program with quality assurance (QA). Hear about tagging workflows, resource management, QA metrics, and developing indexing guidelines.

To be successful in taxonomy, you need to create an internal support program to keep it relevant, maintained, and trusted. A taxonomy program incorporates the governance components of business alignment, clearly defined roles and responsibilities, system capabilities, communication and change management, and more. Little presents key best practices in developing a taxonomy governance program. To illustrate these principles, Nairouz and Pettai present a detailed view of the taxonomy program used to manage the Deloitte Global Enterprise Taxonomy, comprising 20-plus global vocabularies mapping to 44-member firms, including the process for maintenance and annual updates, change management, and application support.

The term “proof of concept” (PoC) usually refers to technology projects, but for semantics-driven solutions, other elements can pose a real challenge. When embarking on enterprise semantics projects, there are many moving parts besides the technical infrastructure: editorial workflow, governance processes, and the modeling of the taxonomy, ontology, or graph itself. Jenkins reviews a project with a large governmental organization that broke down an enterprise taxonomy project into multiple PoC components to help build buy-in and prove the overall approach. Dwyer discusses how the IMF is exploring knowledge graphs and ontologies for knowledge discovery and enterprise search using a PoC to help bring these cutting-edge concepts into focus.

Join us for the Enterprise Solutions Showcase Grand Opening reception. Explore the latest products and services from the top companies in the marketplace while enjoying flavorful fare and drink. Open to all conference attendees, speakers, and sponsors.

“Headless” CMS tools, which decouple content structure from its front-end presentation, have seen growing adoption over the last several years as they support creating flexible, reusable omnichannel and personalization-ready content. However, many organizations struggle with adopting a “decoupled” mindset, a gap that can be filled by taxonomy (and taxonomists) with the vocabularies and tools we already use. Fitzgerald provides an overview of the benefits and challenges of the “headless” approach and examples of how taxonomy best practices can be used to bridge this divide to create holistic, scalable solutions.

Many organizations need reusable semantic services across the enterprise, such as the automatic and consistent extraction of named entities from text. There are low-cost services from cloud providers, but some companies train their own extractors for each type of entity (e.g., brand names, proteins, or product names). To train and deploy such specific extraction models, taxonomies can yield quality and cost benefits by automating the laborious pre-labeling of training documents and training of extractors. Discover a step by step approach in this session, including the technical and economic advantages using demos and example applications.

Indexed product data can help drive search to success by aiding with recall and precision. Hear about the efforts that EIS and MISUMI have undertaken in the last year and a half to use product data to increase MISUMI’s website search accuracy and how these successful searches drive conversion. Crumlett and Schweizer also identify metrics that are important to drive and measure search success.

As information paradigms shift, effective means of representing and displaying knowledge must change to keep pace. The rise of knowledge graphs and the underlying graph database technologies which support them, as well as generationally driven demands on knowledge creation and sharing, makes it essential to consider new ways of presenting traditionally hierarchical knowledge organization systems such as taxonomies. Hear about different ways to pivot taxonomies for viewing, including associative relationship browsing, traversing associative relationships to surface concept properties, and visualization.

Ontologies have gained momentum as a strong foundation for resolving business challenges through semantic search solutions, recommendation engines, and AI strategies. Taxonomists are now faced with the challenge of gaining knowledge and experience in designing and documenting complex solutions that involve the integration of taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs. Taxonomists are well-poised to learn how to design user-centric ontologies, analyze and map data from various systems, and understand the technological architecture of knowledge graph solutions. Cakici and Doughty share practical ontology design considerations and review the most common use cases for knowledge graphs to help taxonomists learn to identify business problems that will most benefit from graph solutions.

This session showcases the roles that well-implemented taxonomies and metadata have in making knowledge management systems more than just buckets of documents with a search box. Lambe and Molnar present a SharePoint case study in which an elegant design uses the context of work to add taxonomy tags and metadata in a knowledge hub, minimizing the manual tagging effort while offering a rich search and discovery experience.

Join us for the Enterprise Solutions Showcase Grand Opening reception. Explore the latest products and services from the top companies in the marketplace while enjoying flavorful fare and drink. Open to all conference attendees, speakers, and sponsors.

Building on early knowledge mapping work, Snowden discusses how small things create resilience and sustainable change while large initiatives are more all or nothing. Typically based on an ideal future state definition, large initiatives produce a more linguistic conformance approach than real change. It’s more difficult to allocate blame with smaller initiatives, and the right people usually get the credit. If something small fails, we are likely to learn from it. Getting to the right metaphor is important. The estuarine metaphor is a physical image that people understand. It’s not all about linear flows; tides matter. Cynefin ideas resonate between the familiar and the novel and produce a body of material that can be reused or adapted. Working with nautical charts to create a real-time strategic representation for organizations with the ability to initiate surveys in real time, Snowden links to the future of C2 command in military terms. He emphasizes that any approach to strategy needs to be dynamic and non-linear, allowing for fractal or, maybe better, holographic representation (break it and the picture is still there in the shards) for a fluid integration of strategy with operations and tactics. We need new ways to express strategic intent--enough structure for direction while maintaining spontaneity and adjustments. This links in turn to the balance of rules and heuristics and critically ideas of distributed, not delegated, authority. Gain new insights and ideas from Snowden!

For over 25 years Synaptica has been helping clients to Organize, Categorize and Discover enterprise knowledge. Individually and collectively these three tasks require people from different teams and departments to collaborate, to understand each other’s roles, and to share knowledge. The common goal is to make search more relevant and knowledge more discoverable. Achieving this goal requires the coordinated effort of content specialists, information scientists, data scientists, and computer scientists. In this short talk Clarke will discuss how to promote cross-team collaboration that pulls together stakeholders responsible for content, metadata, taxonomy, databases, information architecture, and search.

The Great Resignation affects organizations in many ways and contributes to the loss of critical knowledge. As employees leave, much of their expertise goes with them, resulting in knowledge gaps. Meanwhile, current employees don't have the resources or past knowledge to do their best work and perform at the top of their profession. If unchecked, employees give up on trying to find and leverage institutional knowledge, and organizations lose their competitive edge and begin to atrophy. Intelligent search is the key to unlocking organizational information and surfacing insights that are crucial to success in today's market. CMSWire conducted a market research study to evaluate the perceptions that affect KM and how important content can reach employees across the enterprise. Come hear surprising and insightful results from the survey as well as how to capitalize on knowledge assets to minimize turnover and maximize performance; how to deal with disconnects, evaluate misalignment, and explore paths to fix knowledge gap challenges; and how the latest advances in search provide better relevance than ever before for critical stakeholders.

In knowledge-intensive workflows, where decisions have to be made continuously, users benefit from accurate suggestions. In recommender systems, the business objects (documents, experts, products, suppliers, etc.) that best fit the respective context are automatically brought into the spotlight. The possible applications are many. Blumauer provides a comprehensive overview of possible uses of recommender systems and why they should be central building blocks in the digital workplace, especially in enterprise information systems such as knowledge and content hubs, customer experience platforms, or support systems. He shares examples and demos applications in the environment of HR management, drug approval, and technical support for software or legal. Hear how to establish a recommender in your own environment and move your organization’s digital transformation ahead.

Etsy is working to incorporate semantic data models alongside its traditional product category hierarchy to better understand its 100-plus million one-of-a-kind listings. Members of the taxonomy team share where they came from and how they made it to this union between taxonomy and ontology. Hear how they demonstrated the need for richer semantic data to leadership and internal partners that rely on the data structures to build products for Etsy sellers and buyers. They also touch on how they decide what goes into the traditional taxonomy versus what belongs in these new models. Etsy's ontologist describes the processes and tools used to relate these new data models to the existing taxonomy to ensure a long, successful partnership.

Taxonomies can enhance the discoverability of content or hamper it. Hear about the hurdles, stakes, and strategies involved in writing a customized taxonomy and transitioning subscriber content from vertical-based manual tagging to an automated, evergreen, extensible topic classification system. Hear details about how Politico replaced lists of 1,300 tags with fewer than 500 topics, how they’ve kept the taxonomy at that number for several years and current at the same time, and how they save Editorial the trouble of tagging, without depriving them of input and control.

You see the confusion created when people use the same word to describe different things and different words to describe the same thing. But with no taxonomy management software, and no future plans for your company to invest, where do you even start? How do you use your passion for precise language to wrangle the acronyms, jargon, and synonyms that have grown unruly in your company? How do you invite people into the wonderful world of taxonomy to break down knowledge silos and foster alignment? Winks shares some practical tips for getting started when it feels nearly impossible.

Taxonomy design is the first challenge, but gaining adoption across corporate silos can be even harder. This session includes two case studies of how taxonomies break down barriers between different teams and systems. Maddison presents Adobe’s approach to inform and excite partner teams to gain trust, how they alias to existing taxonomies to not reinvent the wheel, and make adoption easy for new teams as they implement in backend systems. Popky and Hedden discuss the principles of taxonomy linking and Harvard Business School’s hub-and-spoke model of bridging across multiple taxonomies to create a single unified view and the challenges of building and maintaining this model for the HBS Knowledge Site.

The most successful organizations have anchored their content experience with personalization, which allows users to connect with content based on key characteristics. This session provides an understanding of how taxonomy powers what every end user now expects—a seamless and personalized experience. O’Brien-Scott and Wahl detail real-world use cases and best practices for taxonomy design for personalization. When these capabilities are harnessed properly, they can enable cutting-edge solutions such as recommendation engines, automated content assembly, and omnichannel delivery.

Interested in industry trends? Stymied by a taxonomy design challenge at work? Bring your toughest, crunchiest taxonomy issues and challenges to our panel of seasoned full-time taxonomists, who compete to answer your questions with insight, entertainment, and perhaps even controversy! The best questions (as voted by the audience) will bring home prizes!