Even the most conscientious taxonomists can sometimes lose track of how fit their taxonomy is for current and future business needs. This talk by an experienced and clear-sighted practitioner will help attendees approach taxonomy evaluation with confidence. During the pandemic, many businesses have paused and used the time to review, reassess, and perhaps re-do their taxonomy. Madi will go over findings from her engagement with taxonomy re-evaluation projects and share observations on how to best prepare enterprise taxonomies for the future. Her solutions for different models of mature taxonomy include:

- One long knitted scarf: what happens when the taxonomy is managed by a non-taxonomist
- Growing miscellany: floating terms in a big pool
- Truncate or Deprecate: antiquated language and outdated terminology
- Magical thinking: outsourcing taxonomy and tagging
- Taking hostages: taxonomy dependencies
- The Disgruntled: how to fix user workarounds

This session explores how we should incorporate the principles of content design - clarity, brevity and accessibility - when creating taxonomies and metadata to support the discoverability of content in user search. Annette champions the removal of vague or grandiose terminology and naming conventions in your taxonomies and content for improved search results and looks at ways to leverage AI solutions to provide relatable metadata and topics.

This session will explore the benefits of knowledge graphs and the idea that knowledge graph building can be successful as an incremental process. Rather than getting bogged down in big development projects, business value can be added at each stage, delivering benefits quickly. Paul and Ravi will show how taxonomies can provide foundational concepts, with identifiers for those concepts, for a graph. Using SKOS-XL can extend the expressiveness available in taxonomy building, as can the use of OWL ontologies. Finally, they will explain how knowledge graphs can be applied to tangible business solutions.