Wednesday, September 27th

Welcome & Keynote: Why Categorize?
9:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
Susan E. Feldman, President, Synthexis Cognitive Computing Consortium
Information systems need to be organized in order to make sense of their contents—and as collections of information of all types have grown exponentially, it has become essential to improve these organization schemes. Classification and categorization projects can incur significant costs, so it’s important to understand why you need such an effort and then how to choose the best way to reach your objective of making information findable. Sue Feldman discusses the state of the art of enriching information and outlines coming challenges, which include understanding and then mimicking the subtle ways that people interact with information, so that they can discover not only the known, but the unknown.


Making the Business Case for Taxonomy
9:45 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.
Joseph Busch, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies
How do you sell your company on a taxonomy project? To start with, by not selling it solely as a taxonomy project. Selling any project usually requires showing the expected Return On Investment (ROI). What are the right questions to ask when estimating the ROI for an enterprisewide taxonomy, and how can they be answered? This session addresses the key aspects of showing ROI, and tackles more detailed questions such as:

  • What is the value proposition for tagging content with taxonomies? Do taxonomies make content reusable? Findable? Improve productivity? How can taxonomy value be measured in a way that quantifies how it contributes to the bottom line?
  • What is needed to build out case studies so practitioners have some support for their efforts?
  • What techniques have vendors and implementers found useful in selling taxonomy efforts to corporate stakeholders?
 

Before You Begin: Defining the Requirements
10:15 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.
Get ready, get set to develop a taxonomy by first understanding what is meant by a taxonomy, including the many current variations.
Next, you will need to understand and choose:

  • Your major strategy options, such as whether it will be a subject or organizational outline.
  • Underlying standards and technologies for creation, such as manual adoption and revision, or automatic.
  • The basic building blocks for taxonomies, from the hierarchical view down to term records.
After outlining these requirements, you will be prepared to evaluate the pros and cons based on practical and realistic expectations. 

Coffee Break—Visit the Taxonomy Boot Camp Pavilion in the InfoX Showcase
10:45 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
Developing an Enterprisewide, Global Taxonomy (Case Study)
11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Marti Heyman, Executive Director, Metadata Standards and Services, Cengage Learning
Peter Doliska, Taxonomist, Deloitte
Hear two taxonomists describe their solution to effective knowledge sharing and the need for a multilingual, controlled vocabulary that was flexible enough to fit the structure of their organization. Learn how and why they developed an enterprisewide taxonomy strategy, including the processes and techniques used to develop the global taxonomy and local extensions (both geographic and by language), the adoption and implementation of the taxonomy, and the vocabulary management software tools that were critical to the successful enablement of their taxonomy strategy.


Taxonomy Clinic: FAST, Factiva, and Teragram
12:00 p.m. - 12:30 p.m.
The Taxonomy Clinic presents brief tutorials and demos of important taxonomy solutions and tools given by product experts from the sponsoring companies. Attendees will gain a basic understanding of how each works and how the products differ.


Lunch Break & Visit the Taxonomy Boot Camp Pavilion in the InfoX Showcase
12:30 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
A Blueprint for Taxonomy Development & Implementation
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect & Founder, KAPS Group Author, Deep Text
This session details the steps that lead to a successful taxonomy initiative and describes how to position your taxonomy as a foundation element for other applications, including intranet organization, search, content management, portals, text mining, and more. Learn what tools to use—and when—in the taxonomy development cycle, about presentation tools to demonstrate the taxonomy, and about basic format decisions, plus how to incorporate multiple world views and vocabularies into your taxonomy.


A Taxonomy Life Story: Home Office, U.K. (Case Study)
2:45 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Jan Parry, Head of e-Working Programme, Home Office
Nigel Owens, Taxonomy Integration Project Manager, Home Office
Learn about the work involved in a huge project that pulls together the various other “lists” that were owned throughout the Home Office into a taxonomy, which is being integrated with all the departments’ IT systems. The taxonomy will also be used on the company’s intranet and its Internet Web site to allow the general public to find government information. The project involved collaboration with information professionals, IT teams, consultants, and civil servants who just wanted to find things!


Break—Visit the Taxonomy Boot Camp Pavilion in the InfoX Showcase
3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Design Concepts and Making the Build, Buy, Automate Decision
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Jim Wessely, President, Advanced Document Sciences
Implementing a taxonomy project can be a challenging task, but knowing what to do and why helps tremendously. It is critical to make the right design decisions up front in order to implement your project properly and in the right direction. This session explores fundamental considerations and examines taxonomy technologies, tools, software, and vendors so you can make well-informed design decisions for your project. You will learn:

  • About different types of taxonomies and how they can be used.
  • Why some applications use manual classification when others are automated.
  • When to use an existing taxonomy and when to build your own.
  • What other resources can be used to assist taxonomy creation.
  • About technologies that may be used to create, customize, and maintain taxonomies.
  • Strengths and weaknesses of the different technologies.
  • Which taxonomy software vendors use which technology.
  • Which taxonomy software is best for your project.
 

InfoX Showcase Reception
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Thursday, September 28th

Building a Taxonomy: The Process
9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
Seth Earley, CEO, Earley Information Science Author, The AI Powered Enterprise
Wendi Pohs, Chief Technology Officer, InfoClear Consulting
What are the steps in deriving a taxonomy? Where do you start? What questions do you ask? What are the best sources for terms? How are they arranged into the actual taxonomy? In this session, you will learn the tactics of taxonomy derivation—the specific process steps that you need to go through to get to your end result. Seth Earley and Wendi Pohs will discuss user interviews, types of questions to ask, working session techniques, work task analysis, content analysis, how taxonomy terms can be pulled from process maps, ways of understanding patterns and themes, and how to think about metadata fields versus taxonomy term values. You will leave this session with a clear understanding of how to derive your taxonomy.


Taxonomy Clinic: LexisNexis, Data Harmony and Scope e-Knowledge
10:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
The Taxonomy Clinic presents brief tutorials and demos of important taxonomy solutions and tools given by product experts from the sponsoring companies. Attendees will gain a basic understanding of how each works and how the products differ.


Coffee Break—Visit the Taxonomy Boot Camp Pavilion in the InfoX Showcase
10:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Enabling Your Taxonomy: Integration & Implementation
11:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.
Seth Earley, CEO, Earley Information Science Author, The AI Powered Enterprise
Wendi Pohs, Chief Technology Officer, InfoClear Consulting
Now that you have a taxonomy, how can you apply it? How should you consider search scenarios? What about resolving navigation with the taxonomy? (Remember, taxonomy and navigation are not the same!) Learn how to leverage your taxonomy as metadata for faceted search, ways to leverage thesaurus terms with search engines for term expansion, how to apply the taxonomy as a foundation for a portal implementation, and other practical applications of your shiny new taxonomy. This session will show you where the taxonomy rubber meets the road.


Testing & Usability: Making It Work
11:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Joseph Busch, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies
Ron Daniel, Disruptive Technologies Director, Elsevier
Effective taxonomies are not carved in stone. They must be modified based on changes in content, user needs, and budgeting realities. Developing a taxonomy in an incremental fashion requires that we can measure how well it is working in order to plan its next version. How is that done? In this session, you will learn:

  • Tagging just enough content to see if it works is a good first step to test taxonomies, but how much content is enough for validation?
  • What other approaches have been shown to be effective, such as open and closed card sorting, use-based scenario testing, and focus groups?
  • How to evaluate test results, what they mean, and what corrective steps can be taken.
 

Lunch Break & Visit the Taxonomy Boot Camp Pavilion in the InfoX Showcase
12:15 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Who Owns It & Taking Care of It: Governance & Maintenance Issues
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Ron Daniel, Disruptive Technologies Director, Elsevier
After an organization has developed and deployed taxonomies, how do you keep them, and the associated metadata, updated to reflect all the changes in and around the organization? What kind of a team is needed for maintenance, what skills and tools do they need, and what governance processes should they follow, including:

  • What are the sources that require changes, such as organizational change, SME input, end-user feedback, and tagging difficulties?
  • What are the two fundamental processes every organization should implement to maintain metadata and taxonomies?
  • What team structures are used in different organizations to manage the changes to their taxonomies?
 

Enterprise Vocabulary: Groundwork, Goverance & Connections (Case Study)
2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Paula Markes, Senior Information Scientist, Eli Lilly and Company
Developing an actual taxonomy is only part of the challenge. Paula Markes from Eli Lilly will discuss how she laid the groundwork for the project in advance, including outlining the business reasons and the deliverables, made the necessary connections to similar activity in the IT department, and worked with a variety of people to establish recommendations for continued governance and maintenance.


Break—Visit the Taxonomy Boot Camp Pavilion in the InfoX Showcase
3:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Facets & Folksonomies: Increasing a Taxonomy’s Effectiveness (Case Study)
3:30 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.
Lisa Kamm, User Experience Manager, Google Cloud
IBM has developed a 3700-node enterprise taxonomy, plus multiple other taxonomies that drive information delivery and classification, personalization, and metadata schemes across the company. Now IBM is looking at how to increase the effectiveness and the quality of its taxonomy by using facets and taxonomy subsets to narrow taxonomy views to critical information. IBM is also exploring the use of “folksonomies” in an enterprise environment as a way to allow its taxonomy to be more responsive to user needs and as a method for determining gaps or problems in the existing taxonomy. Listen and learn how IBM has made a good taxonomy better and more effective.


On the Horizon: Strategies and Tools for Tomorrow and Beyond (Panel)
4:15 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Joseph Busch, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies
Seth Earley, CEO, Earley Information Science Author, The AI Powered Enterprise
Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect & Founder, KAPS Group Author, Deep Text
Jim Wessely, President, Advanced Document Sciences
Taxonomies and the entire area of organizing information are evolving rapidly. Entity extraction, tagging, and a dozen other ways to categorize are coming to the forefront. Listen to this panel of experts reach beyond the tactical, practical information you’ve heard from them during this conference as they share their blue-sky ideas about what’s on the horizon. Query them about what you heard—and what you didn’t—and gather your insights and lessons learned during this closing panel.