Join colleagues and Taxonomy Boot Camp speakers for breakfast and discussion groups built around topics of common interest.  Trade ideas, share solutions, and tap into the experience of other attendees before you begin the day's sessions.

Anyone who has worked on taxonomy projects knows the challenges of making a business case.One important solution is to visually demonstrate the values of taxonomy.However,until the taxonomy is implemented in real-world applications, we sometimes find ourselves in a Catch-22 scenario: The value of the taxonomy needs to be demonstrated to gain a go-ahead to successfully complete the project.  But a completed taxonomy or implementation is required to demonstrate the value.Are we trapped? The good news is there are 22 or more ways to demonstrate value creatively and progressively throughout the project cycle.This session presents a set of demo techniques you can use to make your case.

Ontologies are often presented as next-generation taxonomies,but how do ontologies differ from taxonomies?  What does it mean to ontologize a taxonomy?  What is the business value of an ontology?  How are ontologies likely to evolve in coming years?  Learn about the distinctive advantages of an ontological representation and how to determine if it's appropriate for your needs.

Too often,taxonomies fall off the organizational radar after deployment.  To ensure ongoing support and success,it is crucial that a robust taxonomy governance program is in place post-deployment.  To ease adoption,Barnes and Witczak propose a pragmatic, tools-agnostic approach that uses existing process knowledge.Learn how to implement taxonomy maintenance processes, including organizational roles and structures from the development process;how to transition from development-focused metrics to operational metrics; how to structure the taxonomy maintenance to look like existing enterprise data and software maintenance processes; and how to coordinate taxonomy changes with other system changes.

This session presents a case study on a taxonomy designed for a government general inquiry service.It will discuss the journey from taxonomy chaos to order and why the obvious is never simple.  Hear how five simple questions lead to a sound taxonomy and why low-tech trumps high-tech when testing a taxonomy.

The General Motors Media Archive began tagging and indexing its content in 1993 using a customized controlled vocabulary.  The Adam Opel Public Relations Archive began doing the same in 1997 with a different customized controlled vocabulary.  Hear about the process of merging these two disparate vocabularies into one bilingual (German and English) faceted taxonomy, which enabled GM to understand its visual heritage, gain insight into the cultural/corporate context reflected in its imagery, and discover the impact of its imagery on customers and staff.

The Associated Press (AP) has undertaken a mission-critical project to increase the speed and flexibility in how it describes and delivers rich (multimedia) news content.  AP has integrated metadata management into every aspect of the content acquisition,storage,and delivery process using SchemaLogicís SchemaServer as the semantic backbone.  Amy Sweigert will describe the project and business advantages and the use of both simple and complex taxonomies.

You've developed a taxonomy or perhaps leveraged a public source of terms.  For certain applications, such as tagging content via drop-downs in a content management system, using the taxonomy is reasonably straightforward.  But what if there are hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of terms?  How can large taxonomies be leveraged through clustering, entity extraction, faceted search,
and plain old content tagging?  How can changes to public taxonomies be reconciled with the taxonomy, especially after terms have been adapted for internal use?  These and other challenges related to managing and updating large-scale taxonomies will be covered.

In global organizations,one taxonomy does not fit all.Often,the concepts and terms used in different jurisdictions and business units are different.  Linked or mapped taxonomies can assist with this challenge.  Users in one jurisdiction or business unit are only required to classify and search for content based on terms that they know.  By mapping or linking their terms to a taxonomy used in another jurisdiction or business unit, they can search its content without needing to understand its taxonomy or concepts.  The work of linking the concepts together is done by managing the taxonomy lists.  This session illustrates how linked and mapped taxonomies are used to classify and organize content at a Canadian law firm.

Gaining central control over metadata is the key to realizing the IT and business benefits of enterprise content management (ECM).  Providing central control of metadata and offering critical content management services,including taxonomy and classification management, enable an organization to derive the critical benefits of ECM, such as reduced risk, lower costs,and greater content leverageability.  This session outlines the business problems and the classification challenges for unstructured business content and shows how normalizing metadata from heterogeneous content sources works to enable the standardization of platform, policies, processes, and content management best practices across the enterprise.

Over the past year the U.S.Air Forceís Enterprise Vocabulary Team has developed a range of "bottom-up" vocabularies for use in automated metadata tagging of structured and unstructured content.  Recognizing dramatic problems of ambiguity, its most critical task was aligning the different vocabularies: reconciling differences without imposing definitions.  Learn about the Air Force's dynamic process for developing, maintaining, and implementing large-scale vocabularies and how your organization might implement such a process.  The driver for this massive effort is the growing reality of a "net-centric" environment, where every member (and every sensor) can be connected to the enterprise store of information assets regardless of location or time.

We all know the importance of ensuring that taxonomies offer user interactions that reflect the language that users really use.  However, in a Web 2.0 world it is not enough to simply tailor the language of the taxonomy to the lexicon of our average or target user.  Web 2.0 gives us countless ways of interacting with our users to better respond to their needs and reflect their voice in our design.  This session explores some of the emerging ways we can leverage technology to bring the user into our taxonomies and expand our ability to deliver quality user interactions through taxonomy development and deployment.

The newest discovery technologies, such as relational navigation, allow users to tumble across search results, moving between data repositories at any step along the way.  Relational navigation leverages faceted metadata to provide users with context to back up content.  It illuminates dynamic relationships between data points from information sources across the enterprise and on the Web to deliver high-value, high-impact information in a personalized and intuitive way.  Relational navigation enables improved information discovery by harnessing taxonomy's ability to guide navigation without the downside of offering just one path through the taxonomy.  Attendees will learn about the importance of faceted taxonomies in improving information access and discovery and how organizations are using relational navigation to harness increasing volumes of enterprise and Web-based information.

Taxonomies and folksonomies each have their strengths,and new forms of knowledge representation, including facets, facts, and new visualization techniques, are showing more and more promise.  This thought-provoking endnote session describes recent research that studied combining the formal strength of taxonomies with the social and collaborative nature of folksonomy creation and utilization, theoretical ideas (complexity theory), collaborative software, and traditional taxonomy governance methods.  The project then extended that approach to include the development of faceted metadata and the use of facts (sets of RDF-based Subject-Verb-Object triples).  The basic finding was that for a small increase in the task of adding tags, their usefulness was greatly improved, and by including facets and facts in the mix, the result was a powerful new way to develop knowledge structures that are both formal and social and theoretical and practical.