Conference program chair Stephanie Lemieux welcomes attendees to the start of Taxonomy Boot Camp 2018!

Taxonomies and ontologies are seeing a resurgence of interest and usage as Big Data proliferates, machine learning advances, and integration of data becomes more paramount. The previous models of labor-intensive, centralized vocabulary construction and maintenance do not mesh well in today’s interdisciplinary world. Learn about how information professionals can play a starring role in this new world. McGuinness gives a real-world view of building and maintaining large collaborative, interdisciplinary vocabularies along with the data repositories and services they empower, such as the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences’ Child Health Exposure Analysis Resource.

Sharing knowledge for enterprise success requires entrepreneurial skills, new ways of thinking and operating, continuous learning, and change. There are many new tools available to help, but it is the people and the culture of an organization that determines its ultimate success. Wilkinson interviewed 200 of today’s top entrepreneurs, including the founders of Airbnb, LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Yelp, Dropbox, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Chipotle, Under Armour, Spanx, Jetblue, and Revolution Foods, to distill what it takes to go from startup to scale in our rapidly changing economy. As leaders reinvent their approaches to digital transformation for organization survival in this economy, they can learn these fundamental skills, practice them, and pass them on. Join our accomplished researcher and speaker as she shares her framework and provides ways to master the skills that underlie entrepreneurial success.

The information industry is abuzz with excitement about emerging and maturing technologies often grouped under the ubiquitous yet nebulous rubric of AI, or with nascent disruptive technologies such as blockchain, which may be poised to migrate from the confines of cryptocurrencies and cultivate business applications in other diverse activities such as records management. The growth of big data applications has produced a tectonic shift across the information landscape, challenging enterprises to rationalize the collision between information science and data science. Within some industries linked data, ontologies and the semantic web have had a major impact, whereas in other industries these technologies are perceived as academic or over-engineered. Clarke surveys industry trends before honing-in on common practical applications and tools that taxonomists and others need to do their job.