As we embark on 2 days of intensive and informative discussions about taxonomies, Regli describes the “current state of the taxonomy nation”:  What’s happening with taxonomies, where progress is occurring and where struggles continue. Are enterprises still focused on, and investing in, taxonomies?  Is technology replacing the need for librarians and taxonomists? Are taxonomies losing momentum or ready for full steam ahead? Hear what our industry watcher predicts.

Search is among our most important and complex challenges. As the choice of first resort for many users and tasks, search is a defining
element of the user experience and a critical window into the taxonomies we build. However, it not only influences who we find and what we learn, but search also shapes how we create value and share knowledge. In this fast-paced session, Peter Morville highlights best practices and emerging technologies that transform enterprise social search into a vital tool for collaboration, knowledge management, and discovery.

Developing the business case, setting strategy, getting stakeholders on board, and engaging in the collaborative process of developing a content organization framework are as important as ever, and the new technologies just heighten people’s expectations. This means that project scoping, start-up, on-boarding, education, and high-level taxonomy remain critical factors in the success of a taxonomy effort. This session focuses on making the business case by addressing these points: What are the best criteria for identifying business stakeholders to participate in the project, how do you get them involved, and what should be their role in the taxonomy development process? What do business managers need to know about taxonomy and why it’s important? What are the critical start-up tasks in a taxonomy project? What are the best practices for early tasks and deliverables such as the high-level taxonomy design?

It’s one thing to lay the groundwork for a taxonomy with strategy and planning, but quite another to follow through with implementing the strategies and plans and realizing the results. Follow how the city of St. Louis and the FDA benefited from investing in their plans and what was learned while putting those plans into action.

Taxonomy software is an increasingly complex vendor and feature-rich landscape. In addition to basic development features designed to make the task of the taxonomist simpler and more productive, there’s a whole range of capabilities built on top of taxonomy management, from categorization rules associated with each taxonomy node to distributed taxonomy development, entity extraction, and sentiment analysis. This means the old method of enumerating features and developing a score card simply doesn’t work very well. Reamy looks at what’s new and includes an in-depth analysis of critical capabilities designed to match software capabilities with a range of possible applications.

Ever wonder what in the world organizations do after all those taxonomy initiatives are finished? Speakers highlight the ongoing taxonomy development and global implementation at Motorola, global manufacturer, showing how this company is integrating its global taxonomy with its CMS (Content Management System) to improve navigation and labeling consistency and to drive dynamic content on its customer-facing website, www.motorola.com.

Some taxonomies are used by human indexers or taggers, while other taxonomies are linked to content by automated indexing (auto-categorization).  This difference in how the taxonomy is used plays a significant role in how the taxonomy is constructed. Usage influences how taxonomy concepts are defined, what kind and how many variant (nonpreferred) terms are created, and how structured the term relationships are. The indexing method also impacts the taxonomy support tasks in policy development, rules writing, scope note writing, and training.

Both “ontology” and “folksonomy” have been buzzwords for the past couple of years, but how are they used in practice? Our experts discuss their definitions and experiences in implementing alternative vocabulary structures in real-world applications. They present business and tool requirements for creating an integrated, semantic infrastructure, as well as some of the more common implementation techniques and pratfalls, including their own.

Continue the day’s discussions with new colleagues and old friends over drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Meet and talk with the speakers and the conference sponsors.