One of the characteristics of taxonomy work is that taxonomists can work remotely from their managers, colleagues, or clients, and many do. It’s not because those attracted to taxonomy work specifically want to work from home. Rather, taxonomy work is a narrow specialty, in which relatively few people are sufficiently skilled. So, when a taxonomist is needed to fill a position or serve as a consultant or contractor, often the ideal candidate is not to be found locally, and someone qualified, interested, and available lives far away.
Taxonomists are also accustomed to working independently. As an employee, a taxonomist is typically in the role of an “individual contributor” without supervisory reports yet not in a junior position that requires close supervision. In many organizations the taxonomist knows more about taxonomy than his or her supervisor.
Furthermore, taxonomy work lends itself to consulting and contracting work. Taxonomy design and development is of a project nature that requires intense work only temporarily (after which maintenance work can be part-time). Consultants make a number of visits to their client (to conduct interviews or lead workshops), but the bulk of their working time is spent remotely at their own office. Contract or freelance taxonomy editors are needed onsite even less than taxonomy consultants and like other editorial freelancers, indexers, translators, etc., typically never meet a client face-to-face.
Taxonomy work requires the involvement or input of many different people: project sponsors, managers, user interface designers, software engineers, product managers, customer service representatives, indexers, content creators or editors, and sample end-users. In most cases these stakeholders are not located in the same office anyway, so there will inevitably be some degree of remote contacts as a part of taxonomy work. Organizations that require taxonomies tend to be large, and if they are large they tend to have multiple locations. So, the taxonomist will always be remote to some of the taxonomy stakeholders, even if the taxonomist works in the headquarters office. What this means is that even in-house taxonomists develop experience and techniques in working with remote colleagues. If a taxonomist is going to be remote to many stakeholders, the taxonomist could almost as easily be remote to them all.
When I have been in a job-search mode, I have identified suitable positions in other cities and have applied to them with the query about telecommuting. More than once, the hiring manager of a position that did not mention telecommuting as an option was open to the idea of me working remotely from home when I proposed it. It can depend of the position level, though. Junior taxonomists who may require more mentoring are less suitable as remote employees that those who are experienced. On the other end, upper level positions might also be better served in-house. Recently I noticed a position for a Director of Semantic Services in another city. A director is a somewhat senior position, and while the director could be remote from those reporting to that manager, it would probably be better if the director was in the same office as that person’s manager and other senior managers to collaborate on ideas of taxonomy strategy and new opportunities.
If you are trying to decide whether to hire a remote taxonomist, it is important to consider whether that individual has had prior experience in working remotely from home, especially to be employed full-time. The remote worker needs the technology setup, organizational space, and self-discipline to separate work from personal activities. Fortunately, experienced taxonomists tend to have such remote-work experience. The further a long a taxonomist is in his or her career, the more likely that person will have had stints of working from home. Thus, it is easier to count on telecommuting experience among senior taxonomists.
I have now worked as a taxonomist from home in various capacities: a job full-time job entirely from home, a part-time (30 hours/week) job entirely from home, a full-time job one day at home but for a supervisor and team in an office across the country (the position’s originally posted location), a full-time job originally 4 days in the office but later 4 days at home, and several years of consulting and contracting from home. I wasn’t specifically seeking to work from home, but that’s how it worked out to get and keep the jobs I wanted.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Monday, December 3, 2012
Taxonomies and Content Management
Taxonomies are relevant to various applications, implementations, software products, disciplines, and industries, whereas taxonomy itself is not really a discipline or industry. This is apparent in how taxonomy shows up as a topic in presentation session in many different conferences. These include conferences and fields of: knowledge management, enterprise search, content management, digital asset management, semantic technologies, text analytics, document management, records management, indexing, information architecture and user experience.
Content management and content technology was the subject of the most recent conference I attended, the Gilbane Conference in Boston, November 28-29. The Gilbane Conference, now in its 9th year takes place annually the week after Thanksgiving in (end of November or beginning of December) in Boston and often also in San Francisco in May or June. The conference, named after its founder and chair, Frank Gilbane, has the tag-line “Content, Collaboration & Customers – Managing & Enhancing Experience.” Sessions are divided into four tracks: (1) Customers & Engagement, (2) Colleagues & Collaboration, (3) Content Technologies & Infrastructure, and (4) Web & Mobile Publishing.
Taxonomies at this year’s Gilbane conference were the focus of two presentations, and were mentioned in many others. Just as content management strategies and systems may be specialized for either internal/enterprise content or for external/public web content, so may taxonomies be applied either internally or externally (and sometimes both). So, it was appropriate that one presentation on taxonomies, “Value of Taxonomy Management: Research Results” by Joseph Busch, focused on enterprise content taxonomies, and the other, “Taxonomies for E-Commerce,” which I presented, focused on public website taxonomies.
The connection between taxonomies and content management is a very important one. A taxonomy does not do much good when it stands alone. Its purpose of existence is typically to facilitate finadability and retrieval of specific content, whether by browsing or searching. On the other side, content is not of much use if it cannot be found. Content management refers to managing the workflow and lifecycle of content from the planning stage and creation/collection stage through the disposition/archiving stage, with an analysis/evaluation stage bringing it full-circle. There is typically a sub-phase for content organizing, categorizing, metadata-assigning, or indexing. This is where taxonomy comes in: to provide structured categories and/or to provide a consistent vocabulary for metadata and indexing.
The field of content management is often defined in terms of its products: content management systems (CMS) and their variations, which include enterprise content management (ECM)/document management systems and Web Content Management (WCM) systems. The software vendors are an important part of conferences, such as Gilbane, and are also the subject of analysis and comparison by industry analysis firms such as The Real Story Group, CMS Watch, IDC, Forrester Research, and the Digital Clarity Group. Content management tools do include capabilities for managing taxonomies, vocabularies, or metadata, but the capabilities vary. For anything but a simple or small taxonomy, it might be preferable to create the taxonomy externally in a dedicated taxonomy management tool and then import it into the content management system. The limitations of a content management system in the area of taxonomy management, therefore, should not necessarily limit the taxonomy.
Content management and content management systems focus on processes, and that it’s a good way to look at taxonomies, too. Taxonomies are not static, but need follow a life cycle, as does content: planned and designed, developed and edited, possibly translated, published or implemented, used in tagging, then used in browsing and searching, and finally reviewed an analyzed for further revision. Governance is also an important for both content management and taxonomy management.
The biggest challenge to integrating taxonomies with content management strategy and systems is not technical but rather in human resources. A lot of time, energy, and money is put into selecting and implementing a content management system and planning a content strategy around it. Taxonomy is only one piece of the puzzle, and may not always get the investment of time and money it deserves for a full and proper design and development. However, the better a taxonomy is designed, the better it works.
Content management and content technology was the subject of the most recent conference I attended, the Gilbane Conference in Boston, November 28-29. The Gilbane Conference, now in its 9th year takes place annually the week after Thanksgiving in (end of November or beginning of December) in Boston and often also in San Francisco in May or June. The conference, named after its founder and chair, Frank Gilbane, has the tag-line “Content, Collaboration & Customers – Managing & Enhancing Experience.” Sessions are divided into four tracks: (1) Customers & Engagement, (2) Colleagues & Collaboration, (3) Content Technologies & Infrastructure, and (4) Web & Mobile Publishing.
Taxonomies at this year’s Gilbane conference were the focus of two presentations, and were mentioned in many others. Just as content management strategies and systems may be specialized for either internal/enterprise content or for external/public web content, so may taxonomies be applied either internally or externally (and sometimes both). So, it was appropriate that one presentation on taxonomies, “Value of Taxonomy Management: Research Results” by Joseph Busch, focused on enterprise content taxonomies, and the other, “Taxonomies for E-Commerce,” which I presented, focused on public website taxonomies.
The connection between taxonomies and content management is a very important one. A taxonomy does not do much good when it stands alone. Its purpose of existence is typically to facilitate finadability and retrieval of specific content, whether by browsing or searching. On the other side, content is not of much use if it cannot be found. Content management refers to managing the workflow and lifecycle of content from the planning stage and creation/collection stage through the disposition/archiving stage, with an analysis/evaluation stage bringing it full-circle. There is typically a sub-phase for content organizing, categorizing, metadata-assigning, or indexing. This is where taxonomy comes in: to provide structured categories and/or to provide a consistent vocabulary for metadata and indexing.
The field of content management is often defined in terms of its products: content management systems (CMS) and their variations, which include enterprise content management (ECM)/document management systems and Web Content Management (WCM) systems. The software vendors are an important part of conferences, such as Gilbane, and are also the subject of analysis and comparison by industry analysis firms such as The Real Story Group, CMS Watch, IDC, Forrester Research, and the Digital Clarity Group. Content management tools do include capabilities for managing taxonomies, vocabularies, or metadata, but the capabilities vary. For anything but a simple or small taxonomy, it might be preferable to create the taxonomy externally in a dedicated taxonomy management tool and then import it into the content management system. The limitations of a content management system in the area of taxonomy management, therefore, should not necessarily limit the taxonomy.
Content management and content management systems focus on processes, and that it’s a good way to look at taxonomies, too. Taxonomies are not static, but need follow a life cycle, as does content: planned and designed, developed and edited, possibly translated, published or implemented, used in tagging, then used in browsing and searching, and finally reviewed an analyzed for further revision. Governance is also an important for both content management and taxonomy management.
The biggest challenge to integrating taxonomies with content management strategy and systems is not technical but rather in human resources. A lot of time, energy, and money is put into selecting and implementing a content management system and planning a content strategy around it. Taxonomy is only one piece of the puzzle, and may not always get the investment of time and money it deserves for a full and proper design and development. However, the better a taxonomy is designed, the better it works.
Monday, November 26, 2012
E-Commerce Taxonomies
Happy Cyber-Monday! Coincidentally, this week, which is cyber-week for some retailers, I am giving a conference presentation, at Gilbane in Boston on November 29, on “Taxonomies for E-Commerce.”
As online shopping grows, the organization of products for sale on e-commerce websites becomes increasingly important, and there is also more standardization. Websites present the option to either search (used by customers who know what they want and what to call it), and browse (used by customers who are not sure about what they want or what to call it). For holiday gift shopping, browsing tends to be more common than usual, so displayed taxonomies take on a particularly high visibility at this time.
For browsing, e-commerce websites typically organize their products into hierarchical categories, which are then narrowed by the use of facets. Top level categories correspond to “departments” and could be as few as 2-3 for a specialty retailer or as many as 12-17 for a general/mass merchandize retailer. Usually the hierarchy extends one or two more levels deeper, although a very large retailer may find the need for an occasional fourth level.
At the lower levels of the hierarchy, the customer may then refine the set of products by use of facets (also known as attributes, filters, refinements, dimensions, “limit by,” or “narrow by”). The facets are for characteristics that cut across multiple categories. Facets may be for size, color, price range, material, brand, style, special features, and perhaps even customer rating. These facets will vary depending on the department or broader category type. The terms within a facet, known as “facet values” or “attribute values,” are usually in a flat list The user selects a value from each of multiple facets in combination. In some cases, if check boxes are provided, the user is permitted to select more than one value from within the same facet.
Typically retailers are more concerned about the selection and implementation of technology than in the design of the taxonomy. After all, a hierarchical taxonomy of products would appear simple to design, and even the facets are not too challenging to develop, especially with lots of competitor e-commerce websites to analyze and compare. However, my experience working as a taxonomy consultant on e-commerce taxonomies has led me to realize that creating and editing e-commerce taxonomies is not as easy as it seems.
My conference presentation discusses seven challenges:
1. Distinguishing a subcategory from a facet value
At the higher levels, categories are obvious. Standard facets (size, color, price range, etc.) are also obvious. But the distinction between the most specific subcategories and specialized facets can get blurred. Can “type” be a facet? Is a “plaid shirt” a subcategory of shirts, or is plaid a value in a “pattern/type” facet? Are gas and electric stoves subcategories of stoves, or is “energy source” a facet of stoves? Factors to consider in making these decisions include user perceptions and the number of existing levels of subcategories and numbers of facets.
2. Different categorization options
There are often product categories that are difficult to classify. For example, do video games belong in “Toys and Games” or in “Electronics”? Does Home Theater belong in the “Television/Video” or the “Audio/Stereo department? Having the category in both locations, as the polyhierarchy feature of a taxonomy, is possible. But a breadcrumb trail might follow only a single path, not both, and too many polyhierarchies can be confusing to users.
3. Related items
E-commerce taxonomies are hierarchical and generally do not have associative/non-hierarchical relationships between categories. It is not needed in most cases, but accessories to products and related services (installation, repair, etc.) are clearly related to specific product categories. Taxonomic standards might have to be ignored if making such categories narrower to their main product is the only option. But other, creative display options might be possible.
4. Sort order options
Generally a long list of terms, over a dozen, is easier to scan if alphabetized, whereas a short list of under a dozen terms is better suited to some other prescribed “logical” order. Sort order inconsistency will result, however, if the number of subcategories fluctuates. Determining the “logical” order is also a challenge and often centers around what is most important or popular.
5. Competitor website comparisons
For e-commerce taxonomies (unlike enterprise taxonomies), it’s great to be able to compare with competitors. However, often a retailer is somewhat unique, and no single competitor has exactly the same product categories. Furthermore, it’s important to distinguish between category and content comparison from design comparison. Design may be an extension of a retailer’s overall unique brand graphic design.
6. Web site vs. physical store organization
Physical (“brick and mortar”) stores have their own organization for products that might not work online, but there may be pressure to mimic physical store organization to provide a consistent user experience. While it may make sense to have the biggest sellers up front or at the top of the list, product size (a factor in physical store organization), should not necessarily be a factor in online organization.
7. Business needs vs. taxonomy best practices
Online merchants might want to make certain product categories more prominent, by changing the sort order, adding polyhierarchy locations, or even moving a subcategory up a level. It’s important to keep the integrity of the taxonomy intact, though, so that it remains intuitive for the customers to use.
In sum, product taxonomies are not as simple to create as might be expected. Taxonomy design may be under constraints, and business needs can challenge taxonomy standards. Creative solutions may be needed, and customer perspectives need to be considered through creating personas and/or through user testing.
As online shopping grows, the organization of products for sale on e-commerce websites becomes increasingly important, and there is also more standardization. Websites present the option to either search (used by customers who know what they want and what to call it), and browse (used by customers who are not sure about what they want or what to call it). For holiday gift shopping, browsing tends to be more common than usual, so displayed taxonomies take on a particularly high visibility at this time.
For browsing, e-commerce websites typically organize their products into hierarchical categories, which are then narrowed by the use of facets. Top level categories correspond to “departments” and could be as few as 2-3 for a specialty retailer or as many as 12-17 for a general/mass merchandize retailer. Usually the hierarchy extends one or two more levels deeper, although a very large retailer may find the need for an occasional fourth level.
At the lower levels of the hierarchy, the customer may then refine the set of products by use of facets (also known as attributes, filters, refinements, dimensions, “limit by,” or “narrow by”). The facets are for characteristics that cut across multiple categories. Facets may be for size, color, price range, material, brand, style, special features, and perhaps even customer rating. These facets will vary depending on the department or broader category type. The terms within a facet, known as “facet values” or “attribute values,” are usually in a flat list The user selects a value from each of multiple facets in combination. In some cases, if check boxes are provided, the user is permitted to select more than one value from within the same facet.
Typically retailers are more concerned about the selection and implementation of technology than in the design of the taxonomy. After all, a hierarchical taxonomy of products would appear simple to design, and even the facets are not too challenging to develop, especially with lots of competitor e-commerce websites to analyze and compare. However, my experience working as a taxonomy consultant on e-commerce taxonomies has led me to realize that creating and editing e-commerce taxonomies is not as easy as it seems.
My conference presentation discusses seven challenges:
1. Distinguishing a subcategory from a facet value
At the higher levels, categories are obvious. Standard facets (size, color, price range, etc.) are also obvious. But the distinction between the most specific subcategories and specialized facets can get blurred. Can “type” be a facet? Is a “plaid shirt” a subcategory of shirts, or is plaid a value in a “pattern/type” facet? Are gas and electric stoves subcategories of stoves, or is “energy source” a facet of stoves? Factors to consider in making these decisions include user perceptions and the number of existing levels of subcategories and numbers of facets.
2. Different categorization options
There are often product categories that are difficult to classify. For example, do video games belong in “Toys and Games” or in “Electronics”? Does Home Theater belong in the “Television/Video” or the “Audio/Stereo department? Having the category in both locations, as the polyhierarchy feature of a taxonomy, is possible. But a breadcrumb trail might follow only a single path, not both, and too many polyhierarchies can be confusing to users.
3. Related items
E-commerce taxonomies are hierarchical and generally do not have associative/non-hierarchical relationships between categories. It is not needed in most cases, but accessories to products and related services (installation, repair, etc.) are clearly related to specific product categories. Taxonomic standards might have to be ignored if making such categories narrower to their main product is the only option. But other, creative display options might be possible.
4. Sort order options
Generally a long list of terms, over a dozen, is easier to scan if alphabetized, whereas a short list of under a dozen terms is better suited to some other prescribed “logical” order. Sort order inconsistency will result, however, if the number of subcategories fluctuates. Determining the “logical” order is also a challenge and often centers around what is most important or popular.
5. Competitor website comparisons
For e-commerce taxonomies (unlike enterprise taxonomies), it’s great to be able to compare with competitors. However, often a retailer is somewhat unique, and no single competitor has exactly the same product categories. Furthermore, it’s important to distinguish between category and content comparison from design comparison. Design may be an extension of a retailer’s overall unique brand graphic design.
6. Web site vs. physical store organization
Physical (“brick and mortar”) stores have their own organization for products that might not work online, but there may be pressure to mimic physical store organization to provide a consistent user experience. While it may make sense to have the biggest sellers up front or at the top of the list, product size (a factor in physical store organization), should not necessarily be a factor in online organization.
7. Business needs vs. taxonomy best practices
Online merchants might want to make certain product categories more prominent, by changing the sort order, adding polyhierarchy locations, or even moving a subcategory up a level. It’s important to keep the integrity of the taxonomy intact, though, so that it remains intuitive for the customers to use.
In sum, product taxonomies are not as simple to create as might be expected. Taxonomy design may be under constraints, and business needs can challenge taxonomy standards. Creative solutions may be needed, and customer perspectives need to be considered through creating personas and/or through user testing.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
From Taxonomies to Ontologies: Customized and Semantic Relationships
At this year’s Taxonomy Boot Camp conference, I was invited to present on the panel giving 5-minute “Pecha Kucha” lightning talks, for which this year’s theme was ontology. Just as there are different understandings and usages of “taxonomy,” so are there different understandings and usages of “ontology.” You can come to if from different angles. If you come to ontologies from the experience of taxonomies and the field of information management, then, most simply, an ontology is a more complex type of taxonomy that contains richer information.
In my brief presentation, “From Accidental Taxonomist to Accidental Ontologist,” I summed up the differences between taxonomies and ontologies as follows:
- Relationships: Taxonomies have hierarchical and sometimes a simple “related term” associative, but ontologies have semantic relationships, which are custom-created.
- Term Attributes: Taxonomies generally don’t have term attributes, but ontologies do.
- Term Classes: Taxonomies generally don’t have classes for terms, unless you consider facets as classes, but ontologies do.
- Guidelines/Standards: Taxonomies should follow the ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (2005) or ISO 25964, whereas ontologies are expected to follow the Web Ontology Language (OWL) guidelines and make use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF).
- Purposes: Taxonomies support indexing/tagging, categorization, and/or classification of content, and in turn information findability and retrieval. The primary purpose of an ontology is to describe a domain of knowledge, and support of indexing/tagging, categorization, classification, findability, and retrieval can be secondary.
- Tools: Some software supports the creation of only taxonomies, some software is for ontologies, and some software can do both quite well. Additionally, some taxonomy/thesaurus software can support most, if not all, features of ontologies.
In a taxonomy or thesaurus, you may have generic relationships, such as:
Automobile industry RT (related term) Cars, and
Cars RT (related term) Automobile industry
Ford Motor Company NT (narrower term) Lincoln Division, and
Lincoln Division BT (broader term) Ford Motor Company
In an ontology, you may have customized, semantic relationships, such as:
Automobile industry MAN (manufactures) Cars, and
Cars IND (manufactured by the industry) Automobile industry
Ford Motor Company SUB (has subsidiary or division) Lincoln Division, and
Lincoln Division PAR (has parent) Ford Motor Company
If you can customize the relationships, does this change a taxonomy into a ontology? No. Customized relationships are just one feature of an ontology, although perhaps the most important feature. In my online course on taxonomies, although I don’t teach how to create ontologies, I do provide a lesson on customized/semantic relationships. It is often desirable to create a more complex taxonomy without necessarily meeting all the requirements of an ontology.
Furthermore, a customized relationship might not be fully semantic. In the example above, the second set of relationships are customized, because they are designated by the ontologist for the particular case. The relationships are also “semantic” because they contain specific meaning. (Semantic means “has meaning.”) It is possible to customize relationships while still not making them fully semantic. You may decide to simply rename the standard relationships for your particular application and audience. For example, you might rename broader term (BT)/narrower term (NT) as “parent/child,” or rename Related Term as “see also.” If your taxonomy/thesaurus software is more sophisticated, it will allow you to specify any number of customized relationships, and thus you can add more nuances of meaning.
A key component of truly semantic relationships as expected in ontologies is the ability to create directional relationships that are distinct in each direction, with reciprocity. Most of these semantic relationships will be variants of “related term” (RT), rather than variants of the hierarchical relationship. The generic RT relationship, however, is singularly bidirectional. If you simply customized it by renaming it, it would have to be the same in both directions, such has “has partner.” To create a semantic relationship pair, such as MAN (manufactures) and IND (manufactured by the industry), you need a tool that supports ontological relationships and not just “customized” relationships.
If your tool supports customized relationships but not the ability to create distinct pairs of directional relationships that are associative rather than hierarchical, the results cans still be very useful. You may have a “near ontology” if not a strictly defined ontology. For example, you could rename the singular “related term” (RT) as “Manufacturer-Product” with an abbreviation such as MAN-PRO (Credit to Alice Redmond-Neal of Access Innovations, Inc. for the example). Thus, the relationship is the same in either direction:
Automobile industry MAN-PRO Cars, and
Cars MAN-PRO Automobile industry
It is not completely semantic, with the directional details missing, but this may be good enough for your purposes. After all, it should be obvious which is the manufacturer and which is the product. Therefore, taxonomy/thesaurus software that provides most, if not all, features of an ontology may be sufficient, too.
What matters is serving your needs. Rather than calling it an “ontology” when it does not meet all the definitions of an ontology (and causing confusion or disagreement), it may be safer to say your sophisticated taxonomy “has features of an ontology.”
Friday, October 19, 2012
Taxonomies for Multiple Kinds of Users
This week, I again attended the annual Taxonomy Boot Camp
conference held in Washington,
DC, the only conference dedicated
to taxonomies. The main theme I came away with this year is that taxonomies
serve diverse audiences and users.
The theme of different users was best exemplified in a
session dedicate to comparing taxonomies for internal and external use. Representatives
from Johnson Space Center (JSC), Astra-Zeneca, the Associated Press (AP), and
Sears gave examples in panel “Representing Internal and External Taxonomy Requirements
in a Taxonomy Model,” moderated by Gary Carlson. While still remaining
connected, internal and external taxonomies not only have different terms for
the same concept but they may also have different structure. According to Joel
Summerlin of AP, internal taxonomies can be more specialized and complex than
external taxonomies, and internal taxonomies need to support greater precision
in retrieval results, whereas external taxonomies need to support greater
recall.
Even within either the internal or external users of a
taxonomy, there is great variety. But unlike the situation of internal and
external taxonomies, where you can have different taxonomies linked together,
you will have a single taxonomy serving a diverse audience. The use of taxonomy
features of polyhierarchy and nonpreferred (aka synonym) terms can help diverse
users with different vocabularies, perspectives, and approaches find their way
to the desired content.
In the session on internal and external taxonomies, the
diversity of internal users was mentioned by Sarah Berndt as a characteristic
of JSC. In another session, Helen Clegg described the process of building an enterprise
taxonomy at the consulting firm AT Kearney, which has employees in different
countries and in different industry specialties. As for external users, Jenny
Benevento of Sears described how the customers of its retail website range widely,
from repeat shoppers of clothing to those making one-time purchases of engagement
rings to those buying large appliances. From the audience, Paula McCoy of
ProQuest commented on the importance of knowing, before planning the indexing,
who the users are of its different database products.
Other sessions, such as “Taxonomy & Information Architecture,” also
addressed the multiple uses and users of taxonomies. Panelist Gary Carlson
explained how different personas are used in designing websites, and that the
kinds of things that the user-persona seeks or needs can then become taxonomies
or facets.
Overall in various sessions of the conference there was a great diversity
of taxonomy types, and thus taxonomy users, described. These included:
- Enterprise taxonomies for internal users, with a set of three presentations under the title of “Enterprise Taxonomies in Action”
- Public web site taxonomies, as in the case study example of the Consumer Products Safety Commission and additional examples from in the keynote.
- Retail ecommerce taxonomies, as in the example of Sears and additional mentions of Target and REI in other presentations.
- Taxonomies used in for article indexing and then retrieval by library patrons of periodical/reference databases, as described in a presentation about Proquest.
Not only may the same taxonomy be targeted at different users at once, but also different users over time. In the closing keynote, Patrick Lamb observed that taxonomies can further add value when we make them available for re-use.
Finally, the conference itself attracted a diverse audience: taxonomists, information architects, data warehouse managers, search specialists, knowledge managers, and others; those from corporations in all industries, government, and nonprofits; and those both new to and experienced with taxonomies. In fact, it’s rare that you would find such a diverse audience at a professional conference. They are united in their need to make information findable, and they understand the value of taxonomies to make that happen.
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