Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Taxonomy Projects: War Stories & Winning Them!
7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Michael Crandall, Principal Research Scientist, Information School, University of Washington Information School
Gary Carlson, Founder, Factor
Mike and Gary lead participants through the process of identifying the critical components of successful taxonomy projects including tool selection, governance, integration, and staffing, and then engage everyone in an interactive networking session sharing project war stories — the tactics that worked and those that didn’t! Join your colleagues for a great conversation about taxonomy projects.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Continental Breakfast
7:45 a.m. - 9:00 a.m.
Taxonomy Boot Camp Warm-Up!
8:00 a.m. - 8:45 a.m.
Marjorie M.K. Hlava, President & Chairman, Access Innovations, Inc. Data Harmony My blog is TaxoDiary.com
Marjorie ensures that those relatively new to the world of taxonomies are ready for Boot Camp sessions by providing an early morning accelerated overview of critical taxonomy fundamentals, from terminology to construction and tools.

WELCOME & KEYNOTE: Enterprise Social Tools & the Knowledge Organization
9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
Thomas Vander Wal, Sr. Consultant
Social tools are changing our world and our enterprises. It is amazing how much and how quickly information is added by the community when it is relevant. How do organizations take advantage of this to enhance their information and knowledge flows, improve productivity, and streamline the enterprise? Vander Wal, who coined the term “folksonomy”, focuses on the huge untapped potential for social tools with discussions about making it easier for enterprise social tool adoption, tagging, getting tools to mesh, modifying Web 2.0 approaches for the enterprise, interface/interaction design for ease of use, sociality and encouragement of use. He highlights interesting examples of organizations using social tools to enhance their knowledge enterprise. While social tools and services that make up enterprise 2.0 provide a foundation for enterprises, Vander Wal points to some challenges and possible solutions. Filled with ideas and insights you can use in your organization.

Coffee Break & Exhibits Exploration
10:00 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.
Taxonomists: Evolving or Extinct?
10:45 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Patrick Lambe, Principal Consultant, Straits Knowledge Author, Principles of Knowledge Auditing
Patrick uses data from surveys of information management and taxonomy professionals worldwide to explore the evolving role of taxonomists and the “stretch” challenges facing what has traditionally been a highly technical and tightly scoped discipline. Key topics include: What do taxonomists say they do? Where do the demands for taxonomy work spring from? What transdisciplinary skills in information management, including understanding and applying standards, are required?

Dublin Core Redux & Standards Update
11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Michael Crandall, Principal Research Scientist, Information School, University of Washington Information School
Marjorie M.K. Hlava, President & Chairman, Access Innovations, Inc. Data Harmony My blog is TaxoDiary.com
Dublin Core started out 15 years ago as a simple set of 15 standard metadata elements designed to facilitate resource discovery on the web. Today, it has moved well beyond those elements to provide a robust, welldocumented system for building interoperable metadata schemas, applicable to any specific domain of interest. Mike explains how understanding the Singapore Framework, Guidelines to the Dublin Core Abstract Model, Application Profiles, Description Set Profiles, and Interoperability Levels can help systematize metadata development for your taxonomy project and gives you a road map to successful design and implementation. Marjorie highlights the current state of standards, including SKOS, OWL, and others, as well as their implications for those working on taxonomies, ontologies, or folksonomies.

Complimentary Lunch & Exhibits Exploration
12:45 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Managing Semantic Relations in Organizational Vocabularies
1:45 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Dean Allemang, Principal Solutions Architect, data.world
Lisa Dawn Colvin, AI Product Strategist, Semantic Generation
Denise A.D. Bedford, Faculty, Communication Culture and Technology, Georgetown University; & Author, Organizational Intelligence & Knowledge Analytics York University, Coventry University
Cecil O. Lynch, Principal and Chief Knowledge Engineer, OntoReason,LLC Assistant Professor, Medical Informatics,UC Davis School of Medicine
Amanda J Vizedom, Principal Ontologist, Wind River Consulting, LLC Critcollab
Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent
As industrial taxonomies grow in size, the requirements for relationships become more specific, and go beyond the ability of the standard, coarse relationships they represent. Most vocabulary standards provide a mechanism for extending and specializing these relationships, but this does not provide any guidance to the taxonomy practitioner about what extensions should be made and how to organize decisions about these extensions. This panel discusses their experiences in creating and managing large, shared, industrial vocabularies, taxonomies, and ontologies. The panel also will discuss the impact of the representational language on taxonomy evolution; guidelines for specializations of common relations such as broader, narrower, and related and critical issues; and lessons learned from large taxonomy deployment projects.

A Practical Enterprise Taxonomy Program to Support Enterprise Search
2:30 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.
Annie Wang, Senior Manager, Global Knowledge Management, Deloitte
With five business segments operating in 140 countries, Deloitte has over 18 KM platforms. To respond to the business requirements, Deloitte designed an enterprise taxonomy program with four key components: a centralized taxonomy; country- and function-specific terms as local extensions; global taxonomy and local extensions mapped and connected in the form of the master thesaurus; and subsets of taxonomy that can be generated from the Master Thesaurus for customized use of taxonomy for a specific system or application. Wang shares lessons learned during the journey of integrating the enterprise taxonomy and search journey.

Coffee Break
3:15 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Best Bet ROIs: We’ve Seen It All
3:30 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.
Joseph Busch, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies
Seth Earley, CEO, Earley Information Science Author, The AI Powered Enterprise
Jay Ven Eman, CEO, Access Innovations, Inc.
This panel of content management problem-solvers shares their experiences and perspectives of successfully determining the return on investment for folksonomy, taxonomy, and ontology initiatives. Using real-world examples, they illustrate value in many different types of organizations.

SharePoint Information Architecture: Integrating Taxonomy & Metadata
4:15 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Stephanie Lemieux, President & Principal Consultant, Dovecot Studio
Jeff Carr, Senior Manager, Search & Findability, Earley Information Science Adjunct Faculty Columbia University in the City of New York
Can’t find content inside of SharePoint? The speakers focus on how to leverage taxonomy and metadata to improve navigation and search in a SharePoint portal, discussing techniques for implementing taxonomy and metadata using native SharePoint functionality. They also look at the tool’s limitations and potential solutions for complex taxonomic structures and faceted search, including custom development and third-party add-ons.

Networking Reception
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.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Continental Breakfast
8:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m.
Taxonomies: Tools or People?
8:30 a.m. - 9:00 a.m.
Dave Clarke, EVP, Semantic Graph Technology, Synaptica, part of Squirro AG, UK
Paula R McCoy, Managing Editor, Science & Taxonomy, ProQuest
When would one favor human indexing over machine indexing? An example of the human indexing effort is presented along with tools that can help with the process. An example of auto classification is illustrated with a discussion of the reciprocal flow of information between the taxonomy management tool and the auto classification tool. Speakers then discuss how structured vocabularies help refine classifiers and how feedback from the classifier tool to the human editorial team contributes to the continual improvement of the vocabularies.

KEYNOTE: Setting New Taxonomy Objectives
9:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
Leslie Owens, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
Taxonomy investments can do far more than simply improve the enterprise search experience. Taxonomic structures are versatile enough to be built up and broken down for different contexts. Leslie examines the trends in generating and applying taxonomies throughout the information lifecycle to make the process of creating, capturing, distributing, using and preserving information more efficient.

Ontologies & Tagsonomies: Linked Data, Web 3.0 Tag Mush!
9:45 a.m. - 10:25 a.m.
Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent
Jordan Frank, VP, Sales & Business Development, Traction Software
What do ontologies provide that taxonomies and thesauri lack? What is the big deal about the semantic web? What’s the difference between the semantic web, linked data, and Web 3.0 and what are the technologies that will power this next evolution of the web? Christine addresses these questions. Jordan looks at Tag Mush. That’s what you get when you look at a tag cloud generated from a wiki or blog that has been in service for several years. Jordan identifies problems and shows solutions that work today.

Coffee Break
10:25 a.m. - 10:40 a.m.
Folksonomies: Beyond the Folk Tales
10:40 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect & Founder, KAPS Group Author, Deep Text
Stephanie Lemieux, President & Principal Consultant, Dovecot Studio
Tom and Stephanie examine the strengths and weaknesses of folksonomies, the content appropriate for social tagging, hybrid approaches to taxonomy and folksonomy, using folksonomies as a research tool into users’ vocabularies and categorization behaviors, and the ROI on folksonomies vs. taxonomies or ontologies.

Buy vs. Build: Taxonomy Tools, Identifying & Communicating Requirements
11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Alex Barnes, Senior Architect, Strategic Technology Solutions, Hitachi Consulting
Tom Witczak, Manager, Hitachi Consulting
Gary Carlson, Founder, Factor
Alex and Tom outline the latest commercial & open-source taxonomy tools. Gary then identifies approaches for identifying requirements around modeling, governance, integration, workflow, and user profiles as well as strategies for scoping, justifying, and getting buy-in for the project — whether you decide to buy or build. He also covers how to package this in such a way that you get the best answers from your vendors.

Complimentary Lunch
12:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m.
Merging or Integrating Multiple Taxonomies
1:15 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.
Heather Hedden, Taxonomy Consultant, Hedden Information Management, USA Author, The Accidental Taxonomist
Wendi Pohs, Chief Technology Officer, InfoClear Consulting
Carol Hert, Senior Consultant, Factor
Taxonomies increasingly need to be combined, merged, or linked to create a unified enterprise taxonomy from separate departments or to reconcile folksonomies with taxonomies. Heather presents an introduction to merging or integrating taxonomies and making use of standard thesaurus relationships (equivalence, hierarchical, and associative) to determine how to merge/map vocabularies on a term-by-term basis. Wendi’s case study describes how mapping terms, derived from standard data sources and legacy applications, into a merged taxonomy supports a faceted search system at IBM. Carol describes best practices in taxonomy rationalization to address the problems that inevitably crop up during the merging. Andy, who works with business units at Washington State’s Department of Transportation, looks at how he maps its data assets vocabulary with other business areas within the agency and its metadata repository as it pertains to vocabulary interoperability, including managing application schemas and linkages between databases of terms.

Taxonomy Validation: Case Study
2:15 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Joseph Busch, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies
Mike Lauruhn, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies LLC
Rich Morey, Public Health Advisor, Office of Communications, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
Busch and Morey describe the role of taxonomy in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in building a health information network and how the taxonomy was validated with key agency stakeholders. Validation exercises were conducted over several days, providing an opportunity to build confidence that the taxonomy works in the real world and to provide initial training to people using the taxonomy. As SAMHSA launches an integrated website, the taxonomy is providing multiple ways to exchange information with and between customers.

Coffee Break
3:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.
Pecha Kucha: Metadata, Search, & Rescuing Taxonomies!
3:15 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
This method of presenting is fast-paced, focused and fun! Come, learn and vote for the best!

Metadata: Defining & Harnessing
Ron Daniel, Disruptive Technologies Director, Elsevier
Ron defines metadata and provides examples of applications that are harnessing it to add value and create competitive advantage in engineering and government sectors.

Increasing Traffic by Integrating Taxonomy & SEO
Jeff Carr, Senior Manager, Search & Findability, Earley Information Science Adjunct Faculty Columbia University in the City of New York
A successful SEO (search engine optimization) strategy drives the organization of information on the site from the searcher’s perspective. Jeff offers an approach to aligning the internal and external perspectives to ensure findability at both the micro & macro levels.

Rescuing Legacy Taxonomies!
Lisa Dawn Colvin, AI Product Strategist, Semantic Generation
Despite the wide range of tools for taxonomies, Excel is still a popular tool. As more organizations turn to the Semantic Web , they need to consider how they rescue the controlled vocabularies from these spreadsheet prisons! Lisa offers a key!

From the Lighthouse: Visioneering Taxonomies’ Future
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Moderator: Wendi Pohs, Chief Technology Officer, InfoClear Consulting
Daniela Barbosa, Business Development Manager, Dow Jones Client Solutions, Dow Jones & Company
Jenny Benevento, Freelance Taxonomist
Gia Lyons, Social Business Software Consultant, Strategic Consulting, Jive Software
Steve Ardire, VP Strategy & Business Development, Early Stage Semantic Technology Startups
Join Wendi Pohs and this panel of experts as they peer into the future of taxonomies. Each panelist concentrates on a specific area, including semantic management tools, consumer-driven taxonomies, social networking software, and emerging semantic technologies. We’ve asked these speakers to both enlighten and challenge you, so bring your thinking caps and questions.