Marjorie ensures that those relatively new to the world of taxonomies are ready for Boot Camp sessions by providing an early morning accelerated overview of critical taxonomy fundamentals, from terminology to construction and tools.

Social tools are changing our world and our enterprises. It is amazing how much and how quickly information is added by the community when it is relevant. How do organizations take advantage of this to enhance their information and knowledge flows, improve productivity, and streamline the enterprise? Vander Wal, who coined the term “folksonomy”, focuses on the huge untapped potential for social tools with discussions about making it easier for enterprise social tool adoption, tagging, getting tools to mesh, modifying Web 2.0 approaches for the enterprise, interface/interaction design for ease of use, sociality and encouragement of use. He highlights interesting examples of organizations using social tools to enhance their knowledge enterprise. While social tools and services that make up enterprise 2.0 provide a foundation for enterprises, Vander Wal points to some challenges and possible solutions. Filled with ideas and insights you can use in your organization.

Patrick uses data from surveys of information management and taxonomy professionals worldwide to explore the evolving role of taxonomists and the “stretch” challenges facing what has traditionally been a highly technical and tightly scoped discipline. Key topics include: What do taxonomists say they do? Where do the demands for taxonomy work spring from? What transdisciplinary skills in information management, including understanding and applying standards, are required?

Dublin Core started out 15 years ago as a simple set of 15 standard metadata elements designed to facilitate resource discovery on the web. Today, it has moved well beyond those elements to provide a robust, welldocumented system for building interoperable metadata schemas, applicable to any specific domain of interest. Mike explains how understanding the Singapore Framework, Guidelines to the Dublin Core Abstract Model, Application Profiles, Description Set Profiles, and Interoperability Levels can help systematize metadata development for your taxonomy project and gives you a road map to successful design and implementation. Marjorie highlights the current state of standards, including SKOS, OWL, and others, as well as their implications for those working on taxonomies, ontologies, or folksonomies.

As industrial taxonomies grow in size, the requirements for relationships become more specific, and go beyond the ability of the standard, coarse relationships they represent. Most vocabulary standards provide a mechanism for extending and specializing these relationships, but this does not provide any guidance to the taxonomy practitioner about what extensions should be made and how to organize decisions about these extensions. This panel discusses their experiences in creating and managing large, shared, industrial vocabularies, taxonomies, and ontologies. The panel also will discuss the impact of the representational language on taxonomy evolution; guidelines for specializations of common relations such as broader, narrower, and related and critical issues; and lessons learned from large taxonomy deployment projects.

With five business segments operating in 140 countries, Deloitte has over 18 KM platforms. To respond to the business requirements, Deloitte designed an enterprise taxonomy program with four key components: a centralized taxonomy; country- and function-specific terms as local extensions; global taxonomy and local extensions mapped and connected in the form of the master thesaurus; and subsets of taxonomy that can be generated from the Master Thesaurus for customized use of taxonomy for a specific system or application. Wang shares lessons learned during the journey of integrating the enterprise taxonomy and search journey.

This panel of content management problem-solvers shares their experiences and perspectives of successfully determining the return on investment for folksonomy, taxonomy, and ontology initiatives. Using real-world examples, they illustrate value in many different types of organizations.

Can’t find content inside of SharePoint? The speakers focus on how to leverage taxonomy and metadata to improve navigation and search in a SharePoint portal, discussing techniques for implementing taxonomy and metadata using native SharePoint functionality. They also look at the tool’s limitations and potential solutions for complex taxonomic structures and faceted search, including custom development and third-party add-ons.

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.