Join colleagues and Taxonomy Boot Camp faculty for breakfast and discussion.  Trade ideas, share solutions, and tap into the experience of othersbefore beginning the day’s program.

This session explores the enterprise search vendor landscape with a focus on taxonomy support.  The power of taxonomies is best realized through a search engine that leverages metadata in relevance calculations and in the search results user interface. Based on Forrester’s 141-criteria Wave Methodology, this session describes the search vendors’ approaches to manual and automatic classification, as well as end-user tagging and clustering.

ConocoPhillips, the 9th largest corporation in the world, is well known for its exceptionally successful enterprise knowledge sharing program. This case study describes how ConocoPhillips uses a highly scalable, hierarchical taxonomy with auto-categorization, integrated search, and entity extraction applied to a SharePoint knowledge sharing environment.  Accessing distributed content sources from a variety of internal and external locations, it features a very intuitive user interface design that facilitates strong user acceptance with almost no need for user training.  Speakers highlight the problems being solved, the solution requirements, design considerations, and implementation techniques.

Its easy to create your taxonomy, its even easier to create documents and content in your SharePoint portal or intranet. The hard part is getting users to apply the proper tags for classification and organization purposes to utilize all of the hard work you put into building your taxonomy to get the most out of your SharePoint portal or intranet and find the document later! Don shows how a Silicon Valley company leveraged their taxonomist, multiple taxonomies and a couple of corporate applications to create a user friendly metadata search tool for SharePoint with auto classification of all content. In order to find documents, users simply start typing and the solution automatically suggests terms from the corporate taxonomy (metadata) in a drop down menu with in their SharePoint search box. After the user has done their initial query, the user can select facets to further filter down to the exact document or item they are looking for. Don focuses on the current capabilities of building a taxonomy within SharePoint and then demonstrates how to build on top of that with other third party tools like Interse's iBox and others.

Creating,managing, growing, governing, and operationalizing taxonomies make up just part of the job of an enterprise taxonomist. As former chief taxonomist of SchemaLogic, and as a taxonomy and information management consultant, Carlson has a wide variety of experiences with government organizations and Fortune 1000 firms including IBM, Pfizer, Chevron, Associated Press, Microsoft, and Boeing. Lessons from these engagements have shown him that managing the social, political, and technical aspects of a taxonomy initiative is essential. To enable the justification and use of taxonomies in the enterprise, Carlson shares the eight (or so) skills that come in very handy when working across technical and business teams in an enterprise on a project.

Content classification is a key enabler for information management initiatives and helps drive better business outcomes by automating tedious categorization decisions and increasing the value and accessibility of your content. Learn about the different methods of classification, discover through real-world examples how these methods can be used to automate time-consuming and error-prone manual decisions, and learn how to optimize the balance between human and automated decision making. By optimizing this balance, you can realize a rapid ROI on your content investments by reducing employee involvement, freeing them to focus on their core responsibilities.

This session features two organizations using taxonomies to improve user experience in finding and ultimately solving problems or creating new understandings. Chahine illustrates how Caterpillar’s enterprisewide taxonomy strategy, as well as communities of practice addressing taxonomy and content management, has driven the process and techniques for organizing corporate data and dealing with the challenges of search relevancy and findability. AGIS reinvented its business model in 2007, redirecting all its resources into developing a consumer-focused web service for the elderly and those caring for them. Carelli describes working with Access Innovations to deal with the challenges of data normalization across different content providers and using the taxonomy to enrich user experience.

This case study addresses the challenges ProQuest faced in managing multilingual controlled vocabularies using multiple Word documents and authority files maintained in an Oracle database. Speakers describe how implementing a thesaurus management tool helped ProQuest simplify and standardize its business semantic management to create a common language and connect disparate information assets as well as handling large and varied vocabularies and authority files, linking new and existing editorial systems and enabling hierarchical views, and automating thesaurus management tasks.

What is the actual cost and benefit of a taxonomy, and how on earth do you measure it — and communicate those measures? Speakers look at both the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of measuring the impact and “return” and conveying that impact to key users and stakeholders.  They talk about Data Harmony’s experience with showing savings in staff; input time; and increased findability in an association, a corporation, and a government agency.

Moderated by Marydee Ojala, Editor, ONLINE Magazine, industry thoughtleaders consider the issues confronting taxonomies, as well as the hot topics and “where to from here” for the philosophies, tools and technologies of the content management world.