Bite-sized Taxonomy Boot Camp's Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award is designed to highlight the very best practitioners working with taxonomies today, and is given to someone who’s gone the extra mile to support their organisation with taxonomies. 

The winner of Bite-sized Taxonomy Boot Camp’s 2024 Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award is 

Amy Funderburk, Chief Corporate Taxonomist at SAP SE, Germany

Amy was appointed as the first Chief Corporate Taxonomist at SAP in 2022 to maintain and evolve taxonomies, metadata, and ontologies to surface meaningful product- and corporate-related content to SAP customers, as well as collaborate with our internal stakeholders to understand system challenges, identify improvements, and ensure flexibility for updates and other modifications. 

Amy's entry described a situation where taxonomy at SAP was faced with 25 years of legacy product data housed in more than 70 systems.  Over a period of 6 months, Amy developed a unique methodology called "Brand ID" that brings together key product data from top source systems which are automatically updated and accessible by channels using a dedicated API. She worked with marketing technology and IT colleagues to develop a new Taxonomy Worksphere repository that can be maintained by Amy and her Corporate Taxonomy team.

The Corporate Taxonomy team is one person (Amy), supported by one intern, and with two colleague volunteers interested in the topic. There was no budget. So with little resources and no budget, Amy was able to create a true product taxonomy for a portfolio in a repository that will eventually include more than 5,000 active products and solutions.

The judges praised the excellent application describing in detail going from a "Wild West" of chaos, to a well ordered system, despite working with no budget. The nomination impressed the judges because of the complexity, size, and age of the organisation and how those factors would contribute to making taxonomy work extremely challenging. The magnitude of setting up a "single, comprehensive structure" in an organisation the size of SAP is impressive. Furthermore, the cross-team work as well as the internal and external use spoke to a wide-reaching impact and scope.

Our judging panel
Special thanks to our judging panel, recognised experts in the fields of taxonomies, who have given their time to evaluate the 2024 nominations and select this year's winner.

Fran Alexander

The winner of the 2023 Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award, Fran is Taxonomist at the Expedia Group. She started her career as a writer and editor of dictionaries and thesauruses in the UK, and, as technology evolved, she specialised in information architecture, search systems, digital archives, and, more recently, knowledge graphs. She lives in Montreal, Canada. 

Ahren Lehnert

Ahren is an information and knowledge management professional with over twenty years' experience in taxonomy, text analytics, search, and content and records management. He has developed enterprise taxonomies and knowledge development and retrieval strategies as a consultant and full-time employee in a broad range of industries.  

Joyce van Aalten

Joyce is an independent taxonomy consultant and trainer with 15+ years experience with taxonomy, thesaurus, ontologies and knowledge graph projects for a broad range of customers, including KLM, Philips, EEAS, Thesaurus for Health Care and Welfare, and the Thesaurus for the Dutch House of Representatives. She specialises in taxonomy management tools and the possibilities of metadata/taxonomy within information management systems, like Microsoft365/SharePoint.