Taxonomy

In our global business environment, it often isn't enough to derive a taxonomy in English. Frequently, international businesses and websites now need multilingual taxonomies, or local language variations. This session will discuss strategies, solutions, and describe case studies about how to manage multi-lingual taxonomies.

User Experience design is often thought of as distinct or different from taxonomy design. What are good IA practices and how do they influence taxonomy design? In this session you'll hear from three experienced IA's who will share specific examples from their organizations and consulting projects that will illustrate principles that you can apply in your taxonomy projects. 

The advent of social media has organizations rushing to embrace this exciting area. However, without an effective taxonomy in place to control emerging changes in content deployment, implementation can be difficult to manage.

Learn how to bring together multiple existing taxonomies for unified use. Most organizations today have multiple repositories in place; a single system environment is increasingly rare. As a result, more taxonomies are being created, but these vocabularies need to be combined or merged, whether to create a unified enterprise taxonomy from those of separate departments, to bring together taxonomies resulting from acquisitions of companies or product lines, or to reconcile folksonomies with taxonomies. This session looks at three key ways that taxonomies may be combined for different purposes: integrating, merging, or mapping.

In this session we’ll review practices around developing taxonomies as they are specifically applied to faceted search.  We’ll discuss do’s and don’ts and show you how to get more from faceted search and create an intuitive user interface that will improve usability and result in increased conversions.

This presentation will explore how combining a search integration framework with a unified approach to taxonomy management can create an enterprise search platform that delivers highly relevant search results in a conversational user experience. 

This presentation will discuss how to improve user experience through demonstrating the power of taxonomy in e-commerce to the organization. The value of taxonomy is not often understood by decision-makers; this is problematic given that e-commerce websites are simply online catalogs that users must navigate to select products and boost conversion rates. The session will also provide examples of recent e-commerce website redesigns and five tips for overcoming organizational obstacles.

So you've spent time and money developing a taxonomy; was it all worth it? How do we develop metrics and correlate taxonomy performance with realized benefits? This session opens the lines to our audience of practitioners for a roundtable session featuring questions and further discussion from attendees.

What is a good taxonomy? It’s more than a clever organization of concepts and terms. A good taxonomy must make sense from a user-interface and usability perspective. This month, our speakers will drill into key user-centric factors for creating high-impact taxonomies.

John’s focus is on how our cognitive styles and temperaments radically influence the gathering and processing of information. This has implications for taxonomy and search, often in ways that are glossed over as "noise", "outliers", or "too complex to account for". Paying attention to these factors can provide the special sauce necessary for users to get value from taxonomy.

Bob will map out best practices based on real-world case studies from his large-scale search and online community projects. Representative practices include how to integrate content-consumption with content-sharing, how to invite users to take action, and how to build on user-generated rankings. Taken together, these practices keep content dynamic and engaging.

Taxonomy plays a variety of roles in today's information environments – enabling records management, search optimization, personalization and social media among other initiatives. While the role of taxonomy continues to expand, it has always been a key enabler of good navigation and UI. Good navigation is critical for getting users to the content they need.

Organizations today struggle with unifying their enterprise information systems with business processes so that classifications can evolve to meet changing needs, yet remain in context of one another. In most cases, enterprise taxonomy initiatives derive from pain points in search and retrieval, but taxonomy has a much larger role to play in a variety of processes, such as business intelligence, customer relationship management, and master data management. Join us to hear Leslie Owens of Forrester discuss emerging trends in the role of taxonomy in the enterprise, and how information professionals can better leverage the taxonomy message to steer EA strategy toward achieving business objectives.

Building applications and systems to support customer processes - either self service or call center support - requires an understanding of your customer's 'intent' as well as their mental model. Terminology has to be intuitive and self evident in the case of self-service, or needs to lead the service rep down the correct path in the case of call center support.

This session will explore the role of facets in organizing and accessing content. We’ll start with an overview of faceted search and then hear from Peter Bell, one of the founders of Endeca, a faceted search company, about new developments in the field that allow a combination of unstructured and structured tagging and classification.

Join us for this one hour overview of the AIIM IOA Master certificate program.  During this session Gary Kahn, Client Services Partner for Earley & Associates, discusses the program and answers some of the most frequently asked questions, such as:

• What types of companies benefit most from sending trainees to this course?
• What topics does the AIIM IOA course cover?
• Who should attend?
• What is so unique about the course that Earley & Associates offers?
• What is the difference between the 2 day courses and the 4 day course?
• What is the class experience like?

After a brief presention, Gary will take your questions. 

If you have a stake in the success of the information access initiatives in your organization you owe it to yourself to learn more about how this program can help develop the skills needed to move your projects to the next level.

Each quarter we take a little time to go over the basics.  What is a taxonomy, how does it help and how can you develop one?   Our next monthly taxonomy webinar will go through a high level review of the basics of taxonomy definition and development:

• Taxonomy definition
• Taxonomy applications
• User requirements
• The role of use cases
• Creating a domain model
• Vocabulary development
• Maintenance processes
• Governance Framework

We’ll discuss the role of taxonomies in master data management, information architecture and search integration. 

Be sure to join us for this informative overview of taxonomy principles.  Bring your colleagues and managers.  They’ll walk away with a better understanding of how the organization can begin the taxonomy process.

In session 2 (learn more about session 1) we will look at the actual data and data standards that are impacted by electronic health records, and digitization of healthcare.  These include administrative, demographic, clinical, and order data.  There are numerous standards that attempt to describe various aspects of claims, coverage, costs, delivery, diagnoses, treatments and outcomes.  Each of these classification structures and vocabularies plays a critical role in optimizing healthcare delivery, improving patient safety, understanding efficacy of treatments, improving quality of care and controlling overall costs.  However, these languages and vocabularies have evolved over time to meet needs that were not originally considered and have been expanded by different groups for different purposes.  The result is a “Babylonian confusion of languages” that make it difficult to achieve many of these goals.

We’ll discuss the role of these taxonomies and information science approaches in addressing:

• Clinical trial automation
• Post marketing drug surveillance
• Benefit-Risk analysis
• Comparative effectiveness of treatments

The session will summarize how diagnostic codes of ICD-9, MedDRA and SNOWMED compare in terms of coverage, semantic precision, concept independence and semantic breadth and how organizations need to adapt and map classification structures in order to address their challenges.

Taxonomy and metadata management are critical to ensuring enterprise data quality.  Robust data quality is a prerequisite for creating trusted and optimized data applications, both for internal tasks (such as business intelligence) and customer-facing applications (such as e-commerce websites).  In this session, we look at approaches for cleansing, harmonizing and creating data structures for data that is below required quality thresholds.  This webinar uses as an example product data quality, but has broad applicability to master data management (MDM) in general.

Seth Earley provides an industry perspective focusing on the business need for taxonomy and metadata management to MDM.

Rennie Walker discusses a recent large-scale product data quality project for a major retailer.  This segment of the webinar offers insights into methodology, approaches to project design, governance and lessons learned.  In addition, Rennie addresses the capabilities and functionalities of data quality tools, using Oracle's PDQ (Product Data Quality) suite as an example.

Ford Foundation is one of the world's largest philanthropic organizations.   Each year the Foundation receives about 44,000 grant proposals and since its inception has distributed about $16 Billion in grants world wide.  Our guest speaker this month is Nicki Lodico, Manager of Information Management at Ford Foundation.  In this session Ms. Lodico discusses the challenges that the FF faced and the tools and techniques that were used to create a system in SharePoint that works well to support the organization's goals. 

Session agenda:

• The Problem – Information Management Challenges
• Developing an Information Management Strategy
  • Steps to the process
  • Example IM Lifecycles
  • Findings and Recommendations
• Project approach
• Taxonomy, metadata and IA for SharePoint

Although many of the challenges that the FF encountered were SharePoint specific this insightful case study provides a detailed look at the process of developing and implementing a content strategy.

Designing and implementing a practical and effective taxonomy always starts with a practical and effective set of project requirements. Whether you're developing or implementing a taxonomy, using in-house talent, or creating a vendor/consultant request for proposal (RFP), you need to clearly scope the project and identify the application framework. When you get the ball rolling with a set of well-defined goals and requirements, you'll be more likely to end up with a result that meets your expectations. In this session, our speakers will offer practical insights into the requirements development process. 

Hear how taxonomy projects are essential to knowledge management initiatives, and learn how to apply thesaurus structures to improve the findability of explicit knowledge, and the ability to locate and leverage tacit expertise.

Speakers will focus on the need to define context and process, and how to apply taxonomies to effectively support KM.

>>View Webinar Recording <<

Many organizations initiate taxonomy projects when facing navigation issues on their websites, but taxonomy doesn’t equal navigation. Taxonomies can be informative in designing better navigation, but it’s only part of the story. And while navigation requirements can inform taxonomy, they shouldn’t determine taxonomy organization.

In this instructive webinar, we unwind the complex relation between taxonomy and navigation using real-world examples. We’ll explore:

• the relation between taxonomy and faceted navigation,
• the handling of polyhierarchies,
• when card sorts and navigation tests can validate taxonomy, and
• using facets to create creative and unique navigational entry points to your content.

Join us for a sixty-minute deep dive into the overlap between taxonomy and UI design. You’ll come away with a deeper understanding of this core issue for taxonomists and information architects.