Boot Camp's call for speakers has now closed, but we'd still love to hear your ideas.

Please contact us here if you're interested in submitting your story.

2020 theme: Moving forward

Now in our fifth year, Taxonomy Boot Camp London is once again looking to showcase the very best insights and practices in taxonomy and related work. As always, we welcome contributions from taxonomy practitioners, technologists, researchers, developers, information architects, product managers and so on. Taxonomies are at the heart of the event, but we cover a vast range of topics around knowledge and information management.

What makes this a great community is the desire to ‘sort out stuff’, whether it’s content, navigation, data or metadata. Our attendees have a wide spectrum of experience and knowledge; some are complete beginners who have been told by their boss to “do a taxonomy”, while others have years of experience of working hands-on with highly complex taxonomies and projects. For this reason, we look to build a programme which caters for anyone who uses or manages taxonomies, ontologies, search applications and semantic data, and more.

Based on audience feedback, there is interest in presentations in the following fields, so if this is your area of interest, please send us your ideas:

Taxonomies for absolute beginners; the theory, the reality and the best practices
Enterprise search, including structured data, relevance engineering and day-to-day management
The ethical aspects of working with models and classifications
Working with taxonomies, ontologies and knowledge graphs
Blockchain - cutting through the hype to get to what’s useful
Real-life case studies – share your story of what went well (and what didn’t!)

Talk lengths: 20 minutes - 35 minutes - ideas for full or half day pre-conference workshops, especially topics for beginners

These are some of the many areas we are interested in, but please don’t feel limited by them. Feel free to suggest your own:

  • Big data analytics and the use of taxonomies
  • Blockchain
  • Enterprise search, especially relevance engineering
  • Getting management buy-in, and selling the value of taxonomy projects
  • Getting your taxonomy adopted and used in the organisation
  • Implementation of taxonomies and metadata, e.g. DAM, CMS, SharePoint, etc
  • Information architecture, website navigation
  • Intranet and digital workplace
  • Linked data and semantic technologies
  • Managing multilingual vocabularies
  • Metadata management
  • NLP, machine learning, text analytics, AI
  • Ontology creation and usage
  • Search engines and taxonomy (especially e-commerce search)
  • Tagging - anything from auto-categorisation to manual application
  • Taxonomy maintenance and governance
  • Taxonomy modelling and development
  • Taxonomy software
  • User research
  • Working collaboratively with stakeholders, content and IT teams


We're always open to comments, ideas and suggestions for Taxonomy Boot Camp, so please get in touch - we’d love to hear from you.

E: TBCL-Speakers@infotoday.com

Helen Lippell
Conference Chair
Taxonomy, metadata and search consultant

* Notification regarding acceptance will be made by the end of May 2020. If your proposal is selected, the primary speaker will receive a free registration to the full conference, which includes lunches and a reception. Additional speakers receive a 40% discount on conference registration.

A Conference Code of Conduct is in place for all participants at Information Today events. Full details can be found at: www.infotoday.com/CodeOfConduct.shtml