Thursday, November 2nd

Taxonomy 101: How to Build a Taxonomy
7:45 a.m. - 8:45 a.m.
This brief, optional pre-conference session is for novices who want to learn the step-by-step fundamentals of how to build a taxonomy. Taxonomy Boot Camp sessions assume a basic familiarity with taxonomy construction.


Opening Keynote: The New Shape of Knowledge: Everything Is Miscellaneous
9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
David Weinberger, Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Author, Everyday Chaos, Everything is Miscellaneous, Too Big to Know, Cluetrain Manifesto (co-author)
The digitizing of information resources allows us to reinvent the basic principles by which we manage and organize knowledge, thereby transforming the shape and authority of knowledge. Debunking linear information models, Weinberger explores how we can get more value from organizational knowledge and expertise by treating knowledge as a miscellaneous collection of data and metadata to be sorted and ordered by users. This approach wrings the maximum potential from what an organization knows — improving information flows, increasing innovation, enabling the power of social knowing to emerge — but it changes the role of experts and knowledge and information managers.


Networking Break — A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
10:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
The Categorization Quandary: Making Choices
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Susan E. Feldman, President, Synthexis Cognitive Computing Consortium
It is clear that categorization is a necessary part of a good information access system.  What is less clear is what kind of categorization technology or approach is best. Does everyone need a taxonomy?  What about clustering engines, rule based classifiers, automatic classifiers?  This session will demystify the types of categorization and discuss the pros and cons, and tradeoffs of each.


Buy, Build, Automate: The Great Debate
11:30 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Wendi Pohs, Chief Technology Officer, InfoClear Consulting
Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect & Founder, KAPS Group Author, Deep Text
Jim Wessely, President, Advanced Document Sciences
One of the biggest challenges of any taxonomy project is actually “getting” the taxonomy. Can you buy an existing taxonomy? Do you have to build one from the ground up? Or can you use an automatic categorizer to create one for you? This lively debate explores what you need to make the decision to buy or build your taxonomy, or if automatic taxonomy generation will work for you, as each of the speakers presents and defends an option.


Lunch Break — A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
12:15 p.m. - 1:15 p.m.
Defining Your Strategy
1:15 p.m. - 1:35 p.m.
Ed Stevenson, Director, Content Strategies, Really Strategies, Inc
While having their own complexities beyond fielded metadata, taxonomies need to be approached as part of your full metadata set. This session will focus on how taxonomies fit into an overall metadata strategy, including how to identify different types of metadata for your organization, how to manage content and data modeling issues for fielded metadata, and how to identify and implement work flow to handle both standard metadata and taxonomies.


Team Building & Project Management
1:35 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Lynda Moulton, Principal, LWM Technology Services
Building your taxonomy team and defining expected contributions from each team member is crucial to the success of your project. How to build your team and then creating a work plan, refining the processes, managing the technologies, and pushing the deliverables into production are the focus for this practical presentation by a consultant who manages large-scale, long-term taxonomy projects.


Networking Break — A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
2:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Low-Cost & No-Cost Taxonomy Tools
2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Mark Goldstein, President, International Research Center
Often taxonomy development and its integration are seen as part of expensive and complex enterprise toolsets and suites. There are, however, a number of free open source and low-cost commercial tools that enable full taxonomy development and maintenance for more modest budgets. This session covers the availability of existing open source taxonomies, a variety of taxonomy tools for modest budgets, comparisons of their capabilities, and an analysis of their applicability for integration to portal and search applications.


Automatic Metadata Generation: Proving the ROI
3:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.
Roger Sperberg, Taxonomy Project Tech Lead, Wolters Kluwer
Learn how automatic metadata generation solutions can be used cost-efficiently and effectively for large-scale projects without a major investment in human resources. In this case study, Wolters Kluwer, a major publisher, will illustrate how it has applied Teragram’s automatic metadata solution to its vast repositories of published materials.


Developing & Maintaining an Enterprise Taxonomy
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Moderator: Joseph Busch, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies
Jayne Dutra, Consultant, Information Management for the Arts California State University, Fullerton
Kevin Lynch, Chief Knowledge Architect, Raytheon
Graf Mouen, Project Lead, Media Archive Retrieval System, ABC Company
Taxonomy experts at four companies share real operational experiences in deploying a taxonomy strategy at the enterprise level. The tire hits the pavement in this dynamic panel as practitioners reveal the truth about what it takes to keep current, maintain compliance, ensure data integrity, support structural expansion, and still keep your job.


Taxonomy Boot Camp Welcome Reception and Networking Dinners
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
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. Then wrap up the day, if you wish, by joining a Networking Dinner Group for a fun and casual evening at a nearby restaurant. (Watch the Taxonomy Boot Camp Web site for signup forms for these Dutch-treat dinners.)


Friday, November 3rd

Continental Breakfast
8:00 a.m. - 8:30 a.m.
Operationalizing Your Taxonomy
8:30 a.m. - 9:15 a.m.
Seth Earley, CEO, Earley Information Science Author, The AI Powered Enterprise
How do you roll your taxonomy to the enterprise? This may mean technical integration, but also new editorial standards and work processes. The real question is how the taxonomy fits in with overall content creation and management. Deploying the taxonomy means integrating it with existing systems and wrapping tagging into current and updated processes. Another issue is training consumers of information. Is there a way to do that effectively? Is it possible to train external users of your site? This thoughtful session explores these and other issues around “socializing” the taxonomy within the organization to ensure it is an effective tool.


Testing Your Taxonomy
9:15 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
Joseph Busch, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies
Ron Daniel, Disruptive Technologies Director, Elsevier
Your taxonomy will not be perfect or complete and will need to be modified based on changing content, user needs, and other practical considerations. Developing a taxonomy incrementally requires measuring how well it is working in order to plan how to modify it. In this session, you will learn qualitative and quantitative taxonomy testing methods including:

• Tagging representative content to see if it works and determining how much content is good enough for validation
• Card-sorting, use-based scenario testing, and focus groups to determine if the taxonomy makes sense to your target audiences and to provide clues about how to fix it
• Benchmarks and metrics to evaluate usability test results, identify coverage gaps, and provide guidance for changes.


Taxonomy Integration: Putting Your Taxonomy to Work
9:45 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.
Theresa Regli, Director, Vox Veritas Digital Ltd, UK
Once you’ve gone through the process of building your taxonomy, you may think the hard part is over. Integrating the taxonomy with various technologies — content repositories, search engines, content management systems, portals, or Web sites — is not only just as challenging, but also the point at which the real business value of the taxonomy is realized. In this session, best practices in taxonomy integration and implementation are discussed and examined, illustrated by case studies.


Integrating Taxonomies with Single-Sourcing
10:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Richard Beatch, Search & Information Architect, Allstate
One major taxonomy challenge is how to easily integrate a taxonomy into multiple content management and content delivery environments in a way that is responsive, scalable, and cost-effective. Using an XML solution, Richard Beatch has implemented a solution at Allstate that has one stored taxonomy that can be consumed by all affected applications. The result is vastly improved turnaround times and ease-of-use for taxonomy changes and maintenance.


Using XML to Structure & Manage Taxonomies
11:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Darin Stewart, Director, Research Information Services, Oregon Health & Science University
Using XML to structure and maintain taxonomies facilitates interoperability, integration, and opportunities for reuse. Beginning with a properly structured and tagged taxonomy and its associated schema, this session will demonstrate how XSLT stylesheets can transform the taxonomy into a form that is compatible with any XML-friendly tool or application, including several search engines. It will also show how XML-based taxonomies can be easily integrated and repurposed.


Taxonomy Governance & Maintenance: Best Practices
11:30 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Beth Golden, Dow Jones & Company
Susan Saraidaridis, Enterprise Taxonomist & Metadata Manager, Business School Publishing
Once you’ve developed a taxonomy, the work has only begun. Keeping it current, meaningful, and accurate over time as business needs evolve is an ongoing effort. Hear best practices and innovative approaches for maintaining your carefully constructed taxonomy. As a result, you will learn how to derive maximum value from your information assets and keep end users coming back for more. A case study from Harvard Business School illustrates these best practices in action.


Lunch Break
12:15 p.m. - 1:15 p.m.
Semi-Automated Creation of Faceted Hierarchies
1:15 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Marti Hearst, Professor, School of Information, University of California - Berkeley
Faceted navigation for information collections is gaining wide acceptance. However, a considerable impediment to the wider adoption of faceted interfaces is the creation of the faceted hierarchies and the assignments of terms from the hierarchies to the information items. Marti Hearst and her colleague, Emilia Stoica have designed an algorithm called Castanet that semiautomatically
generates hierarchical faceted metadata from textual description of items. Using an existing lexical database (such as WordNet), the algorithm carves out a structure that reflects the contents of the target information collection. Learn how the algorithm has been successfully applied to collections as diverse as recipes, biomedical journal titles, and art history image descriptions. The resulting category hierarchies require only small adjustments to achieve intuitive results with good coverage.


Getting the Best of Both: Taxonomies & Faceted Navigation
2:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect & Founder, KAPS Group Author, Deep Text
Faceted navigation has been getting a lot of press, but it is important to understand what facets really are, how facets are different from categories, and how to combine facets and categories to create powerful but easy-to-use information access. The right balance of taxonomies and facets combines the best of browsing and advanced search in ways that users will actually use. This session presents the results of a recent project that combined two standard hierarchical taxonomies and then set up a mechanism for dynamically mapping them across two facet dimensions to enable users to zero in on content faster and easier than with just facets or categories.


Coffee Break
2:45 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.
Social Tagging: Does It Work Inside the Firewall?
3:15 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Sarah Goldman, Manager for Information Discovery, IBM’s Intranet, IBM Corporation
Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent
Manya Kapikian, Raytheon
Donna Cuomo, Assoc Director, Knowledge, Information & Collaboration Solutions, MITRE Corp.
Laurie Damianos, Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer, MITRE Corp.
Is there any method to the madness of social tagging? Will the advantages that David Weinberger advocates in his keynote work inside the firewall? How can folksonomies be leveraged to strengthen traditional taxonomies and make them more dynamic? Hear how three large organizations are harnessing the power of social tagging using the wisdom of the masses to improve search and inform the entire enterprise. See examples of the tools, work flows, and policies that govern their efforts, and find out how to get comfortable in this brave new world.


Bridging the Gap Between Folksonomies & Taxonomies: The Semantic Web Approach
4:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Brad Allen, Founder & CTO, Siderean Software
As illustrated in the prior session, the rapid emergence of social tagging has had a ripple effect in corporate settings due to the potential positive impact on the cost and quality of human-generated metadata. This closing session discusses forward-thinking work on systems that are beginning to merge social tagging with more formal approaches to metadata creation and management. The goal is to allow folksonomies to make taxonomies more responsive to change, while allowing taxonomies to make folksonomies more responsible in the context of information governance.