What are the steps in deriving a taxonomy? Where do you start? What questions do you ask? What are the best sources for terms? How are they arranged into the actual taxonomy? In this session, you will learn the tactics of taxonomy derivation—the specific process steps that you need to go through to get to your end result. Seth Earley and Wendi Pohs will discuss user interviews, types of questions to ask, working session techniques, work task analysis, content analysis, how taxonomy terms can be pulled from process maps, ways of understanding patterns and themes, and how to think about metadata fields versus taxonomy term values. You will leave this session with a clear understanding of how to derive your taxonomy.

The Taxonomy Clinic presents brief tutorials and demos of important taxonomy solutions and tools given by product experts from the sponsoring companies. Attendees will gain a basic understanding of how each works and how the products differ.

Now that you have a taxonomy, how can you apply it? How should you consider search scenarios? What about resolving navigation with the taxonomy? (Remember, taxonomy and navigation are not the same!) Learn how to leverage your taxonomy as metadata for faceted search, ways to leverage thesaurus terms with search engines for term expansion, how to apply the taxonomy as a foundation for a portal implementation, and other practical applications of your shiny new taxonomy. This session will show you where the taxonomy rubber meets the road.

Effective taxonomies are not carved in stone. They must be modified based on changes in content, user needs, and budgeting realities. Developing a taxonomy in an incremental fashion requires that we can measure how well it is working in order to plan its next version. How is that done? In this session, you will learn:

• Tagging just enough content to see if it works is a good first step to test taxonomies, but how much content is enough for validation?
• What other approaches have been shown to be effective, such as open and closed card sorting, use-based scenario testing, and focus groups?
• How to evaluate test results, what they mean, and what corrective steps can be taken.

After an organization has developed and deployed taxonomies, how do you keep them, and the associated metadata, updated to reflect all the changes in and around the organization? What kind of a team is needed for maintenance, what skills and tools do they need, and what governance processes should they follow, including:

• What are the sources that require changes, such as organizational change, SME input, end-user feedback, and tagging difficulties?
• What are the two fundamental processes every organization should implement to maintain metadata and taxonomies?
• What team structures are used in different organizations to manage the changes to their taxonomies?

Developing an actual taxonomy is only part of the challenge. Paula Markes from Eli Lilly will discuss how she laid the groundwork for the project in advance, including outlining the business reasons and the deliverables, made the necessary connections to similar activity in the IT department, and worked with a variety of people to establish recommendations for continued governance and maintenance.

IBM has developed a 3700-node enterprise taxonomy, plus multiple other taxonomies that drive information delivery and classification, personalization, and metadata schemes across the company. Now IBM is looking at how to increase the effectiveness and the quality of its taxonomy by using facets and taxonomy subsets to narrow taxonomy views to critical information. IBM is also exploring the use of “folksonomies” in an enterprise environment as a way to allow its taxonomy to be more responsive to user needs and as a method for determining gaps or problems in the existing taxonomy. Listen and learn how IBM has made a good taxonomy better and more effective.

Taxonomies and the entire area of organizing information are evolving rapidly. Entity extraction, tagging, and a dozen other ways to categorize are coming to the forefront. Listen to this panel of experts reach beyond the tactical, practical information you’ve heard from them during this conference as they share their blue-sky ideas about what’s on the horizon. Query them about what you heard—and what you didn’t—and gather your insights and lessons learned during this closing panel.