This October, for the third year in a row, I have enjoyed
the opportunity to attend and present at Taxonomy Boot Camp London (TBCL).
Similar in subject area scope, but with unique
presentations, to its parent conference Taxonomy Boot Camp (TBC), usually held
in Washington, DC, in November, I find it worth my time to attend both
conferences. Despite what might be considered a niche topic for select
audience, TBCL remains a strong conference with consistent attendance (about
170 participants), comparable to TBC in its earlier years. The size is large
enough to offer a choice of two tracks but small enough to easily network with
others. The conference speakers and attendees are quite international,
representing 22 countries this year.
Conference Format
TBCL continues to differ from TBC by having two tracks on
both days, instead of just on the first day as TBC does. It also has a
pre-conference workshop day, which TBC lacks, a full-day Taxonomy Fundamentals
workshop (which I lead), and two half day workshops on more specialized or
advanced taxonomy topics, which are not the same each year. This year the
half-day workshops were on text analytics and taxonomies in SharePoint
For the first time, Taxonomy Boot Camp London presented two
awards (which Taxonomy Boot Camp in Washington, DC, does not do.) The winner of
the Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year award was Tom Alexander, Taxonomy
Manager, Cancer Research UK. The winner of the Taxonomy Success of the Year
award was SAGE Research Methods Thesaurus, led by Alan Maloney & Martha
Sedgwick, SAGE Publishing.
Exhibits
The
exhibit/sponsor showcase is very different at TBCL from TBC. TBC has a small
dedicated exhibit on its first day, but then shares the much larger KM World
exhibit with the four other co-located conferences. TBCL’s exhibit space is
similar to that of TBC’s first day, with just three software vendor
sponsor-exhibitors (Synaptica, Access Innovations, and Semantic Web
Company/PoolParty). However, there was a larger number of
organizational supporter-exhibitors: Association for Independent Information
Professionals, the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British
Computer Society, the Danish Union of Librarians, the Knowledge &
Information management Special Interest Group of CILIP (Chartered Institute of
Library and Information Professionals) of the UK, the Information and Records
Management Society of the UK, the UK Chapter of the International Society for
Knowledge Organization (ISKO), the Network for Information & Knowledge
Exchange of the UK, the SLA (Special Libraries Association) Europe chapter, and
the SLA Taxonomy Division. This was a greater number of organizations than last
year. The significant involvement of professional associations in TBCL
contrasts with the relative lack of professional associations involved in TBC.
TBCL continues to be co-located with another Information Today
conference, Internet Librarian International, but their exhibit areas are
somewhat separate (although attendees of both conferences can visit booths of
either conference), since their audience and market is different. Other than
the drinks reception the first day, the two conferences do not share anything,
such as keynotes.
Keynotes
There were three
keynote presentations, two consecutive contrasting keynotes the first day and
one the second day.
The opening
keynote was indeed a keynote style talk, which was on the broader subject of
information on the web, rather than on the specifics of taxonomies. “This is the Bad Place: 13 Rules for
Designing Better Information Environments,” was presented by Paul
Rissen, Product Manager at Springer Nature UK and previously at BBC. In his
thought-providing presentation he aimed at establishing “ground rules” for
using the web (especially social media) and for public discourse in general.
This was
followed by a more down-to-earth state of the profession talk by Dave Clarke,
CEO of Synaptica, titled “Catching the
Wave: What Tools do Taxonomists Need to do Their Job.” Although Synaptica
was the lead sponsor of the conference, this was not promotional talk. Dave
started out be summarizing what taxonomists do and enable as organize,
categorize, and discover, and explained the different tools for each. More of
Dave’s presentation was about what taxonomists are doing based on the results
of a survey of taxonomists he has been conducting (https://twitter.com/DavidClarkeBlog). Then Dave turned to what he
considered to be the future trends and issues. Artificial intelligence (AI) is
relevant to what we do, but it will not replace the need for human-curated
taxonomies or ontologies. Rather, taxonomies and ontologies will empower AI
with the semantics and log to improve search and categorization and perform
machine learning. Ontologies and linked data can help build smarter search and
discovery applications by leveraging the logical dependencies. Linked open data
is shared openly, and linked enterprise data is behind the firewall where the
linked data model also works well.
The
second day’s keynote addressed an important topic. “Selling the Benefits of Taxonomy: Numbers and Stories” was
presented by taxonomy and text analytics consultant Tom Reamy. Tom’s argument
was that return-on-investment (ROI) studies, with their numerical data on time
spent, are not sufficient to convince decision-makers of the benefits of
taxonomies, and that use case stories and internal advocacy are also needed.
Stories can describe the increased richness of knowledge discovery, better
decisions, and analysis of complex issues. He also suggested selling the vision
of a taxonomy by means of a mini demo. Tom then turned to text analytics as the
important means to make taxonomies usable, as he is rather dismissive of manual
indexing. He explained that text analytics is often called auto-categorization,
because that was the first use of it, but that text analytics can be used for
other things, too.
Conference Sessions
The
more basic track had sessions on taxonomy development, user validation,
taxonomy resources, taxonomy development approaches, information architecture,
enterprise information management, tagging, and taxonomy standards and
architecture. I attended mostly sessions of the more advanced track, though.
A
theme of the conference, as stated in the program was “Making taxonomies go
further,” and conference chair Helen Lippell stated in her welcome the opportunity
to “push your practice further.” This
was especially true of several of the advanced track sessions I attended. “Using Ontologies for more than Information
Categorization,” presented by Ahren Lehnart and Jim Sweeney of Synaptica, suggested
using ontologies for project and product management and in support of various
other business functions in sales, marketing, partner and competitor
information management, etc. “Beyond Taxonomy Classification: Using
Knowledge Models and Linked Data to Unlock New Business Models” was
presented by Ben Miller of Wiley. He spoke of knowledge models, as comprising
content acquisition and content enrichment. Jim Sweeney also presented “Taking Your Show on the Road: Publishing
Taxonomies and Ontologies as Linked Data,” which was a good introduction to
Linked Data. In this presentation, he also introduced graph databases and their
benefits. While not explicitly discussing taxonomies, Rahel Anne Baile’s talk, “Introduction to Information 4.0,”
suggested another application for taxonomies which content is in “molecules and
objects,” rather than on as documents, or based on pre-determined topics. Multilingual taxonomies and taxonomy
implementation in SharePoint were the topics of other presentations.
I
am looking forward to Taxonomy Boot Camp in Washington, DC, next week, and
Taxonomy Boot Camp London again next year which has been scheduled for the same
venue October 15-16, 2019, with preconference workshops on October 14.
