Autocategorisation offers much to organisations who need to tag large volumes of content in an accurate and cost-effective way. Sarah draws on Synaptica’s experience of helping clients, and offers the learning themes and questions you need to ask to understand your content and develop the right taxonomies.

Taxonomy for e-commerce customer experience

What I've learned from content migration developing taxonomy, IA and site search

Taxonomy is a key component of any content or data-rich website or app. The two talks in this session, by Chantal and Tom respectively, present case studies in optimising taxonomy use for e-commerce and a charity, including information architecture, navigation, search and overall customer experience.

Leveraging multilingual corporate reference data and AI for enhanced taxonomy management in large organisations

Incorporating AI in a hybrid approach to information management

Two thought-provoking case studies on using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Lucy presents an in-depth look at how generative AI tools were used by a multidisciplinary team to improve the quality of reference data and taxonomy management. Jonathan argues that a hybrid approach to information management, drawing on the strengths of both AI and of well-built taxonomies and ontologies, is one of the best ways to ensure accurate search, relevance and presentation of new information.

It is valuable to learn from success stories, but also from times when things have not gone to plan. Edee presents entertaining and enlightening tales from her own practitioner career, while at the same time offering tips on dealing with unexpected twists in your project and career.

The role of the taxonomist in an agile team

Balancing sustainable semantic practices with enterprise delivery

As taxonomies and ontologies become ever more crucial in enterprise applications, the range of people and teams that taxonomists work with has grown, creating complexity but also making the work even more rewarding. Jo outlines how to flourish in an agile team (though her insights are relevant to any project methodology), while Ahren discusses the balancing act between producing high-quality semantic models while ensuring the models can be used by systems and the wider organisation.

Tips for taxonomy hierarchies

Making the most of SKOS relationships for mapping

This very practical session covers two dimensions of an expressive and interoperable taxonomy. Heather covers all aspects of hierarchies, including faceting, polyhierarchy, and some common pitfalls to watch out for. Michele takes a deep dive into the various SKOS relationships that are useful for mapping and matching taxonomy terms from other sources.

We kick off the 2024 Bite-size series with Fran’s light-hearted overview of two technologies which have been hot topics for the taxonomy community: Large Language Models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and both offer opportunities for taxonomists to deploy their skills in a wide range of potential applications.

The journey from minimal viable taxonomy to full taxonomy

Using micro-genres to target the long tail

This session brings together two perspectives on developing a taxonomy to be richer, more detailed and more useful, while taking into account trade-offs around time, effort and governance. Joyce covers the sometimes bumpy road to take an organisation from having a small ‘minimal viable taxonomy’ to one that can meet ambitious business goals. Ed looks at video game classification, and the strands of work needed to enhance discoverability of less well-known items from the back catalogue.

The Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) is a standard for representing knowledge in taxonomies, thesauri, and any other controlled vocabulary. Madi’s introduction to this very useful tool will help beginners and experienced taxonomists alike to get thinking about how to develop, document and extend their taxonomies.