A half-day pre-conference workshop covering taxonomy basics, to bring you up to speed and kick-start your Taxonomy Boot Camp conference experience. All workshop participants will receive a FREE ebook of the newly-released second edition of Heather Hedden's book The Accidental Taxonomist  (worth £27). This unique workshop is ideal for those with little or basic taxonomy experience who would like to be brought up to speed prior to the main conference, or for those who would like to know more about how to design and create a taxonomy from scratch with a focus on best practices for creating terms and relationships between terms. Topics covered in more depth during the main conference (including synonyms, sources for terms, taxonomy software, taxonomy project management) will only be briefly introduced in this workshop.

Workshop outline:

Introduction, definitions and types

• Definitions and types of controlled vocabularies (taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, etc)
• Benefits of taxonomies and other controlled vocabularies
• Applications and uses of taxonomies and other controlled vocabularies

Creating & wording of terms

• Concept inclusion (deciding whether to include a term)
• Term wording and format, and distinguishing different terms with the same name
• Nonpreferred terms/synonyms

Creating term relationships

• Hierarchical (Broader Term/Narrower Term) relationships
• Associated (Related Term) relationships
• Customised, semantic relationships
• Structural design
• One or more taxonomy or thesaurus, and named entities included or separate
• Categories or classes
• Hierarchies, polyhierarchies, and facets

Display options

• Sorting display options
• Hierarchy end-user display options
• Facet end-user display options

Other topics

• Sources for terms (stakeholders, users, content, and external sources)
• Software for taxonomy editing and management
• Project processes and governance

Workshop Leader

Heather Hedden is a senior vocabulary editor at Gale/Cengage Learning. She has designed taxonomies and metadata schemes for various system implementations both as a consultant and at Cengage Learning. Heather teaches online workshops on taxonomy creation at Simmons College School of Library and Information Science. She serves on the board of the SLA Taxonomy Division, the board of the American Society for Indexing, and in a working group of vocabulary use and reuse for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Heather has published numerous articles, and is the author ofThe Accidental Taxonomist (2010, 2016).