Information systems need to be organized in order to make sense of their contents—and as collections of information of all types have grown exponentially, it has become essential to improve these organization schemes. Classification and categorization projects can incur significant costs, so it’s important to understand why you need such an effort and then how to choose the best way to reach your objective of making information findable. Sue Feldman discusses the state of the art of enriching information and outlines coming challenges, which include understanding and then mimicking the subtle ways that people interact with information, so that they can discover not only the known, but the unknown.

How do you sell your company on a taxonomy project? To start with, by not selling it solely as a taxonomy project. Selling any project usually requires showing the expected Return On Investment (ROI). What are the right questions to ask when estimating the ROI for an enterprisewide taxonomy, and how can they be answered? This session addresses the key aspects of showing ROI, and tackles more detailed questions such as:

• What is the value proposition for tagging content with taxonomies? Do taxonomies make content reusable? Findable? Improve productivity? How can taxonomy value be measured in a way that quantifies how it contributes to the bottom line?
• What is needed to build out case studies so practitioners have some support for their efforts?
• What techniques have vendors and implementers found useful in selling taxonomy efforts to corporate stakeholders?

Get ready, get set to develop a taxonomy by first understanding what is meant by a taxonomy, including the many current variations.
Next, you will need to understand and choose:

• Your major strategy options, such as whether it will be a subject or organizational outline.
• Underlying standards and technologies for creation, such as manual adoption and revision, or automatic.
• The basic building blocks for taxonomies, from the hierarchical view down to term records.

Hear two taxonomists describe their solution to effective knowledge sharing and the need for a multilingual, controlled vocabulary that was flexible enough to fit the structure of their organization. Learn how and why they developed an enterprisewide taxonomy strategy, including the processes and techniques used to develop the global taxonomy and local extensions (both geographic and by language), the adoption and implementation of the taxonomy, and the vocabulary management software tools that were critical to the successful enablement of their taxonomy strategy.

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.

This session details the steps that lead to a successful taxonomy initiative and describes how to position your taxonomy as a foundation element for other applications, including intranet organization, search, content management, portals, text mining, and more. Learn what tools to use—and when—in the taxonomy development cycle, about presentation tools to demonstrate the taxonomy, and about basic format decisions, plus how to incorporate multiple world views and vocabularies into your taxonomy.

Learn about the work involved in a huge project that pulls together the various other “lists” that were owned throughout the Home Office into a taxonomy, which is being integrated with all the departments’ IT systems. The taxonomy will also be used on the company’s intranet and its Internet Web site to allow the general public to find government information. The project involved collaboration with information professionals, IT teams, consultants, and civil servants who just wanted to find things!

Implementing a taxonomy project can be a challenging task, but knowing what to do and why helps tremendously. It is critical to make the right design decisions up front in order to implement your project properly and in the right direction. This session explores fundamental considerations and examines taxonomy technologies, tools, software, and vendors so you can make well-informed design decisions for your project. You will learn:

• About different types of taxonomies and how they can be used.
• Why some applications use manual classification when others are automated.
• When to use an existing taxonomy and when to build your own.
• What other resources can be used to assist taxonomy creation.
• About technologies that may be used to create, customize, and maintain taxonomies.
• Strengths and weaknesses of the different technologies.
• Which taxonomy software vendors use which technology.
• Which taxonomy software is best for your project.