Too often, taxonomy governance is the ‘poor relation’ of a taxonomy project, and yet putting in the effort to get it right pays off in the long-term. Taxonomies that are well-managed stay relevant, correct and useful. Heather has a wealth of experience and distils it into this session.

The value and challenges of developing a 50-year-old subject-specific taxonomy in a constantly changing scientific field

Linguists and knowledge management professionals at a crossroad

This session addresses approaches to maintaining and exploiting complex and established vocabularies, in circumstances where users require accuracy, relevancy, interoperability, reusability and more. Gary discusses the challenges and methods for managing a decades-old scientific taxonomy in the field of food science and nutrition. With colleagues Aniko and Mihai, Denis introduces the EU Publications Office’s use of two semantic applications (VocBench and ShowVoc), which are used by a wide range of stakeholder organisations and professionals in both knowledge management and linguistics.

This session is practitioner-focused and suitable for anyone interested in and/or currently designing and building their first ontologies. Nearmap’s ontology was built from scratch and contains classes used in mapping data covering real-world objects such as buildings, roads, trees. Ann covers the development process including domain analysis, requirements gathering, evaluating existing ontologies, ontology architecture, conceptual modelling, and versioning.

For all levels of taxonomy experience. Designing a taxonomy from scratch means thinking about structure and the types of information captured before starting work on concepts and labels. Jonathan presents a methodology for identifying potential categories - like named entities, business topics or controlled type lists - to enable the addition of synonyms, related terms and other new facets in the future.

CASE STUDY - INDEED
Adapt, adopt & improve: Lessons from an evolving taxonomy of remote work
A look at the nuances of developing a taxonomy of remote work from before COVID-19 to now, addressing the challenges of global taxonomy-building in an evolving job market where shared vocabulary may not yet exist. Senior Taxonomy Analysts at Indeed, Alice Wallace and Allison Joffrion, share an insider's view of how one of the world's leading job sites confronted those challenges to create tailored experiences from messy data to represent both job seeker and employer needs.

CASE STUDY - CANCER RESEARCH UK
Managing a taxonomy in a DAM system
Taxonomy Manager at Cancer Research UK, Tom Alexander describes user-centred work undertaken through the cancer charity's digital asset management system, looking at user-testing words, guerrilla testing, and the challenges of keeping a taxonomy manually synchronised with a website taxonomy.

A taxonomy of taxonomies

Veteran taxonomy solution provider Dave Clarke of Synaptica gives us a guided tour of taxonomies by type and by function.

Begin at the beginning: LSE's adventures in Wikidata-land

Helen Williams, the LSE's Metadata Manager tells the story of the LSE Library’s Wikidata journey, presenting an honest and accessible account of how open data can improve information management and discoverability.

This provocatively-titled talk is designed to equip taxonomists with the tools to unpick content and findability problems. Joyce highlights that the problem may not be because of the taxonomy itself, but from somewhere else such as content structure, tagging quality, business processes etc. We shouldn’t just focus on our own stuff - taxonomists can play their part in helping organisations make more of their investment in search, tagging and content production.

Taxonomies in Knowledge Management Platforms

Collecting Metadata in Context to Enhance Search and Discovery -
A Case Study in Building Knowledge Hub on SharePoint for a Regulatory Agency

This session showcases the role that well-implemented taxonomies and metadata have in making knowledge management systems more than just buckets of documents with a search box. Ahren shows how integrating robust capability for controlled vocabulary management with knowledge management systems can make content more findable, usable and reusable. Next, Patrick presents a SharePoint case study in which an elegant solution for adding taxonomy tags and metadata in a knowledge hub minimises manual tagging effort yet offers a rich search and discovery experience.

Cathy describes the management and governance of reference data in a publishing use case. Reference data define the set of permissible values to be used by other data fields. Structured as taxonomies, this data can be used to support selection of values by editors as they add metadata to content. Plus how SKOS relationships can be used to describe links between reference data sets, and the governance model for developing taxonomies. (Cathy presents this use case from her previous employment at Oxford University Press).