Helen's light-hearted lightening talk reveals a few secrets of what it is really like to go on a TV quiz show such as Mastermind, and draws links between revising for quizzes and her professional work as a taxonomy consultant. Patrick presents a competency development framework he has developed from a global survey of working taxonomists. This will help attendees to profile their roles, and to identify their strengths and areas for development.

This session highlights that for taxonomy projects to succeed, they must engage with colleagues and users alike. Emma’s talk describes the user-centred methodology that GDS developed in order to improve content navigation on GOV.UK. Helen’s talk shows how LSE adopted agile working on a project to improve the tagging of their online content.

This diverse session features four speakers covering topics related to designing taxonomy-driven systems. Vivian talks about a project to review how a taxonomy could support a healthcare decision support system. Janet’s lightning talk describes her efforts to improve image tagging in a voluntary organisation with a limited budget for technology. Jeff covers the very important topic of the use of taxonomies to drive intranet content, using his SharePoint and Office 365 projects as examples. Finally, Joyce, through the entertaining analogy of LEGO and DUPLO, introduces SharePoint managed metadata.

This session features three detailed presentations that show how ontologies and taxonomies are becoming indispensable tools for anyone trying to understand their data. Julia talks about data visualisation for climate change, while Sabrina shows how Kantar TNS build custom taxonomies to analyse social media. Finally, Veronique from Elsevier covers how the SKOS-XL model (an extension of the popular SKOS standard) enriched their vocabularies.

Neil and Sarah from Hackney Borough Council, together with Cathy from Oxford University Press, present case studies describing how automatic indexing and classification helped both their organisations to improve the quality of their taxonomies and their tagging systems. These case studies illustrate the value of maintaining a taxonomy properly with due regard to how it needs to be used.

This session presents two hugely experienced technologists showing how they are using taxonomies in innovative ways to create better digital content delivery. Joe combines case studies and practical tips to show how metadata frameworks and taxonomies drive better content experiences for users. Andreas covers the latest in text mining technology, which is the ability of semantic knowledge graphs to link relevant topics to a piece of text, even if those topics are not mentioned explicitly in the text itself.

Taxonomy governance is always an important part of any project. Yet too often, once a taxonomy has been implemented, governance (along with maintenance) can get downgraded to ‘business as usual' work and then neglected over time. Rita and Lynnette present case studies on doing governance properly, from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the World Bank respectively, while Theresa outlines approaches to getting governance right, so that metadata and vocabularies remain relevant long after they were first designed.

Bob works for Thomson Reuters, who process and aggregate information from multiple sources. They use multiple ontologies and controlled vocabularies to map meaning and context from diverse datasets. Ian will cover a new methodology called the ‘content knowledge graph’, which he argues can help organisations transform their silos of content into a resilient, connected and above all, useful, network of content objects.