Are you an aspiring taxonomist looking for work? Because taxonomies tend to be project-based tasks, a lot of taxonomy work is freelance, contract, or consulting. I have written on this topic in my book, but that was over four years ago, and I have seen or experienced many taxonomy jobs…
Author: Heather Hedden
A Professional Association for Taxonomists
I recently attended the SLA annual conference, which this year was in Vancouver, BC, June 8 – 11. This year marked the 5th anniversary of the professional association’s Taxonomy Division, its newest and fastest growing special interest group. The Taxonomy Division plans the programming of all taxonomy-related sessions for the…
Creating Taxonomies from Scratch
When I first got into taxonomy work, my impression was that the trend was increasingly to revise, redesign, merge, and update existing taxonomies and less for creating new taxonomies. As taxonomies became more common in large organizations, it seemed obvious that there would be less original taxonomy creation needs and…
Taxonomy Software Directories
It’s difficult to find a list of taxonomy management software that is both comprehensive and up to date, yet not overwhelmed with related products and services. I define taxonomy management software as a tool to manually build and edit taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri in accordance with industry standards. It…
Indexing vs. Thesaurus Creation
The activities of back-of-the-book indexing, document/digital asset indexing, and thesaurus/taxonomy creation all require similar skills, but each has its own unique requirements. Indeed a typical career path toward an accidental taxonomist is to first work as an indexer. You might think that the two kinds of indexing are similar to…
Tagging vs. Indexing
I have blogged before on the difference between tags and categories, but recently someone asked me about the difference between tagging and indexing (the manual kind). It’s not a simple answer.One important way in which tagging and indexing differ is that tagging involves any kind of designation for what a…
Taxonomies vs. Thesauri
Two taxonomy consulting projects I worked on last year seemed to lend themselves more to the development of a thesaurus than a set of hierarchical taxonomies. But clients usually ask for a taxonomy and not a thesaurus. Perhaps we need to ask what is in mind with the notion of…
Taxonomy Governance
Recently I was asked to speak on a panel on taxonomy governance, so this gave me an opportunity to reflect more on the subject. “Metadata Enhancement for Improved Content Management – Taxonomies and Governance” was the title of a panel I spoke on at the Gilbane Conference 2013: Content and…
Information Architecture and Taxonomies
While interest in “information architecture” by that name has declined in the past decade, interest in what information architecture involves continues to be strong, and perhaps there is some merging of the fields of taxonomy and information architecture. At one point in my career I wanted to be an…
Taxonomies and Text Analytics Compared
Last week (September 30 – October 1) I attended the Text Analytics World conference in Boston as an invited speaker. This is the second year was fortunate to present at and attend this conference, which also meets in San Francisco in the spring. I posted a blog about the conference…