Could it be you? We're looking for the Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year!

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. It could be you or a colleague who you think deserves recognition for the hard work they've put into taxonomy development and management, or other efforts in the context of taxonomies. Nominations close on 7 August and the winner will be announced at the October Boot Camp. Nominate below.

NOMINATIONS CLOSE 7 AUGUST

Our judging panel
Special thanks to our judging panel, recognised experts in the fields of taxonomies, who have given their time to evaluate the 2024 nominations and select this year's winner.

Fran Alexander

The winner of last year's Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award, Fran is Taxonomist at the Expedia Group. She 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 lives in Montreal, Canada. 

Ahren Lehnert

Ahren is an information and knowledge management professional with over twenty years' experience in taxonomy, text analytics, search, and content and records management. He has developed enterprise taxonomies and knowledge development and retrieval strategies as a consultant and full-time employee in a broad range of industries.  

Joyce van Aalten

Joyce is an independent taxonomy consultant and trainer with 15+ years experience with taxonomy, thesaurus, ontologies and knowledge graph projects for a broad range of customers, including KLM, Philips, EEAS, Thesaurus for Health Care and Welfare, and the Thesaurus for the Dutch House of Representatives. She specialises in taxonomy management tools and the possibilities of metadata/taxonomy within information management systems, like Microsoft365/SharePoint.

Meet the 2023 Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year, Fran Alexander, Taxonomist at the Expedia Group

About Fran
According to colleagues, “Fran has pulled up the 20,000+ technology employees at Expedia Group by the bootstraps to create from scratch a managed knowledge systems graph that did not previously exist at the company”.

Fran's role spans building taxonomies, educating others on what a taxonomy is, formulating a practice around leveraging taxonomies, and supporting a Knowledge Systems team within the Content Platform organisation.

She runs countless training meetings, supporting teams to use the company’s self-service taxonomy tools, and provides consultancy to engineers, designers, product owners, and business operations specialists advocating for the use of semantic technologies and the development of taxonomy knowledge as an essential engineering skill. Of particular note is the governance model that Fran built herself to coordinate different teams and taxonomy owners to review and close gaps in the knowledge system.

Fran has grown a taxonomy community of practice at Expedia to connect people in different parts of the organisation by sharing conversations and resources, and hosting regular get-togethers and special sessions with external and in-house speakers on hot topics.

Fran also gives back to the larger taxonomy and technology communities, participating in student outreach events to inspire them to careers in STEM.

A popular colleague, she has earned various nicknames, including "The Queen of Taxonomy", and a fanbase of designers and engineers called "Fans of Fran". 

Special mention is given to the 4 other taxonomists who made it onto the 2023 shortlist. They were: Manisha Sanghavi of Sage Publishing, Jo Chapman of RWS, Jack Bruce of Access Innovations, and Bree Mahlum from Expedia.