Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award

Each year, the Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award is given to someone who has gone the extra mile to support their organisation with taxonomies. They may be someone who was tasked with managing their organisation's taxonomy, or perhaps they have contributed to the wider taxonomy practice, especially if they have done that in their own time or on their own initiative. We're delighted to announce the winner of the 2025 award is Carol Bishop-Castro.

Carol Bishop-Castro leads Knowledge Management and Learning Innovation at Stanford Health Care, and her taxonomy journey started with a single knowledge base. Faced with scattered, siloed content, she knew real progress toward self-service, AI, and Knowledge-Centered Service had to start with structure. So she built it - one field, one category, one use case at a time - grounding taxonomy in real user workflows, not just theoretical models. 

Carol embedded continuous governance using tools like the Article Quality Index and Process Adherence Review, aligned taxonomy with Knowledge-Centered Service practices to drive reuse and clarity; and made it all AI-ready by enhancing metadata, search terms, and content connections to support emerging tools. 

The results speak for themselves:

A 60% increase in knowledge searches
40% more click-throughs
56% boost in AI ranking relevance
And a 29% drop in call abandonment

But perhaps most impressive is the ripple effect: Carol's work is now influencing teams across the organisation, becoming a trusted advocate for sustainable taxonomy - someone who understands the friction teams face and shows how structure can turn chaos into clarity.

The judges described Carol as a very worthy winner. They praised her compelling story - transforming a chaotic, unstructured approach into an integrated, AI-ready model backed by clear, impactful metrics, and noted that her work sets a benchmark for others in the field. They also highlighted Carol's leadership within the organisation through mentorship and advocacy - and her contributions to the wider knowledge management and taxonomy community.

OUR JUDGES
A big thank you to our judges, who have given their time to review the entries and select this year's winner:

Dawn Brushammar, KM Consultant, Advisor & Evangelist, Dawn Brushammar Consulting AB, Sweden
Dan Howarth, Content Designer, Dept for Business & Trade, UK
Helen Lippell, Taxonomy & Search Consultant, Helen Lippell Business Services, UK