Congratulations to the winner of the 2022 Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award!
Taxonomy Boot Camp's Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award is designed to highlight the very best practitioners working with taxonomies today, and is given to someone who’s gone the extra mile to support their organisation with taxonomies. They may be someone who was tasked with managing their organisation's taxonomy and succeeded, or who has contributed to the wider taxonomy practice, especially if they’ve done that in their own time or on their own initiative.
Taxonomists win the day
The winner of an award designed to highlight the best practitioners working with taxonomies was announced today at Bite-Sized Taxonomy Boot Camp. The winner and shortlisted nominees for the Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year are shown below:
2022 Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year - WINNER
Chantal Schweizer, Director of Solution Delivery and Principal Taxonomist, Earley Information Science, USA.
Chantal is noted for leading taxonomy strategy, design, implementation and governance projects to transform some of the largest organisations in the world, enabling billions of dollars in ecommerce ROI. The judges particularly praised her contribution to the field of information management as a knowledge sharer - not just to her peers and clients but to anyone learning the value of taxonomy for themselves and the benefit of their organisations. Despite her busy schedule Chantal is focused on bringing knowledge and best practices of taxonomy to the world and recently embarked on a social media knowledge sharing campaign called the ‘TaxMOMinist’, producing videos that make basic through advanced taxonomy concepts accessible to the uninitiated.
Chairman of the judges and Boot Camp programme chair Helen Lippell commented, “Taxonomies are proving to be indispensable business assets used in a vast range of applications supporting websites, intranets, search engines, start-ups, knowledge management, scientific research, digital publishing and much more. The calibre of entries this year was extremely high, and the range of diverse and interesting projects shows a maturing of the taxonomy community that is very heartening. I am pleased that TBCL has recognised such a worthy winner from an impressive shortlist”.
The shortlisted nominees were as follows:
• Cristina Belchin, Head of News Research and Content Enrichment, ISI Emerging Markets
• Dave Cooksey, Senior UX Researcher & Information Architect, Charles Schwab Corporation
• Heather Hedden, Data & Knowledge Engineer, Semantic Web Company
• Naveen Kumar NP, Assistant Project Manager - Taxonomy & Data Classification Organisation, Unilog Content Solutions
• Mira Lind, IA & Senior Taxonomist, Meta
• Shraddha Panage, Senior Analyst, Mastercard
• Megan Salerno, Taxonomy Consultant, Enterprise Knowledge LLC
• Emily Crockett Sparrow, Manager of Digital Assets, Center for Creative Leadership
Read more about previous winners here.
Our judging panel
Special thanks to our judging panel, recognised experts in the fields of taxonomies and information architecture, who have given their time to evaluate the 2022 nominations and select this year's winner.
Taxonomy Boot Camp London's Programme Chair, Helen is a taxonomy and semantic modelling consultant, who has been helping clients for over a decade. Her skills include taxonomy development, ontology modelling, tagging initiatives, knowledge graphs, metadata training and content modelling. Helen's clients have included the BBC, the UK government, Financial Times, Time Out, RIBA, the Metropolitan Police of London, Pearson and Electronic Arts.
Fran started her career as a writer and editor of dictionaries and thesauruses in the UK and, as technology evolved, she specialised in information architecture, search systems, digital archives, and, more recently, knowledge graphs. She now lives in Montreal, Canada, and is the Taxonomist for Expedia Group.
Cathy Dolbear is a Data Architect at Jisc, a non-profit digital solution provider for UK education and research. She’s interested in data mesh architectures and supporting the creation of data products through domain modelling. She has a background in semantic technologies, including semantic enrichment of journals and book content using text classification, for linking, search and SEO. She holds a DPhil in Information Engineering from the University of Oxford, is the author of the book Linked Data: A geographic perspective, and holds several patents in personalisation and multimedia technologies. She previously worked at Oxford University Press, and has also held roles at Ordnance Survey, Motorola, and Sharp Labs.