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…
Author: Heather Hedden
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,…
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.…
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…
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…
Text Analytics and Taxonomies
What does text analytics have to do with taxonomies? Not so much, I had previously assumed, other than serving a similar objective of information retrieval. After all, text analytics is known as a natural language processing technology designed to obtain meaning for text without the traditional process of indexing to a…
Mentoring Taxonomist Program
In my last blog post, I discussed the need for mentoring taxonomists and mentioned that I had volunteered to lead the new mentoring committee of the Taxonomy Division of SLA (Special Libraries Association) and establish its mentoring program (http://taxonomy.sla.org/get-involved/mentor). While some of the mentoring activities are available to members only,…
Mentoring Taxonomists: The Need
As explained in Chapter 2 of my book on an introduction to taxonomy creation, The Accidental Taxonomist, the majority of taxonomists did not intend to be taxonomists, and they come to the field by accident from various backgrounds. What this means is that most people who find they want to…
The Accidental Taxonomy Consultant
It’s well known that most taxonomists become taxonomists by accident, as the title of my book attests. As I look back on my career, I see this progression continuing one step further in accidentally becoming a taxonomy consultant.Not all consultants are accidental, though. Bright college graduates in the social sciences…
Deviating from Taxonomy Standards
In my last blog post, I suggested that enterprise taxonomies need not follow the standards for controlled vocabularies and thesuari (ANSI/NISO Z39.19 guidelines and ISO 25964-1) to the same extent as “traditional” discipline taxonomies and thesauri. I say this cautiously, though. Standards should not be ignored for any taxonomy, but…