Taxonomy and Knowledge Organization
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Workshop Objectives

As the struggle to find information continues, more and more people are recognizing that an absolutely necessary step is to organize their content using taxonomies, metadata and other knowledge organization elements. Taxonomies in particular are becoming a favored approach to organizing content. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what a taxonomy is, how best to develop one, and where taxonomy development and maintenance fits into the overall enterprise.

This workshop will look at taxonomy in a broad set of contexts to both avoid some of the common misunderstandings abut taxonomies and to learn to develop truly useful taxonomies. It will present how to develop and utilize deep formal taxonomies that are often used for indexing, searching, and as part of a metadata initiative. And it will present how to develop and utilize what are often called browse taxonomies that provide contextually rich browsing to information that needs to be built upon solid user and usability research.

This workshop will also present how to locate and integrate taxonomy and metadata development within the enterprise – questions of who, what, why, and how – the issues associated with governance, maintenance, and benefits. It will provide best practice guidelines and discuss in detail the specific tasks associated with metadata development, from user research to usability testing. The workshop will also review the types of tools that are available for supporting the development process.

Who Should Attend

The workshop is designed for a wide range of audiences, including content owners and publishers, information architecture and usability staff, librarians, managers of content-related activities and IT staff members who are responsible for the applications that support metadata structures.

Why You Should Attend

• Insure that your Web sites and applications support knowledge worker productivity
• Gain familiarity with the metadata and taxonomy development processes.
• Understand the implications of manual development versus use of tools that are currently available in the marketplace
• Take away a clear understanding of the resources and budget associated with development

Workshop Contents

Day 1: Why a knowledge organization strategy is required Terminology and definitions Metadata Standards Formal Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies Browse Taxonomies – Beyond content – user research Metadata and taxonomy best practices Metadata and taxonomy development process

Day 2: Review of Day 1 Evaluation of available tools Putting together a taxonomy team An Integrated Approach – Develop, Buy, Customize Taxonomies Metadata and Taxonomy in Action: Governance options Maintenance and change control Life cycle of taxonomy initiatives

Workshop Methodology

The workshop is a mixture of lectures, assignments and project work. It also includes games and puzzles to make the sessions more interactive and to help participants retain the concepts. Participants learn the concepts behind the design of user interfaces and to apply these concepts in the product development and evaluation process.