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…
Category: Conferences
Auto-categorization and Taxonomies
Taxonomies and thesauri are only truly useful if their terms are appropriately indexed or tagged to content. My path to taxonomist had been as an indexer, so I always value the importance of human indexers. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge that automated indexing, also called auto-categorization, is becoming increasingly common and…
Taxonomy Boot Camp London Conference
I was fortunate to attend and present the inaugural Taxonomy Boot Camp London conference earlier this month. After 11 successful years in the United States (initially in New York in 2005, then for four years in San Jose, CA, and six years in Washington, DC), Taxonomy Boot Camp held its…
Taxonomies vs. Thesauri: Practical Implementations
The differences between taxonomies and thesauri and when to implement which has been a subject of previous presentations of mine and a previous blog post, Taxonomies vs. Thesauri. Most recently, a presentation of a case study of controlled vocabularies at Cengage Learning, which I gave at the “Taxonomy Café” session…
Taxonomy Courses
Note: Since this blog post was written, Simmons College discontinued its continuing education program. I am now offering the 5-week online workshop, previously offered through Simmons, independently through Hedden Information Management. Information is at: http://www.hedden-information.com/taxonomy-workshop-online.htm __________________________________________________________________________ I have been teaching workshops on how to create taxonomies for over seven years.…
Taxonomy Trends and Future
What are the trends in taxonomies, and where is the field going? The future of taxonomies turned out to be a unifying theme of last week’s annual Taxonomy Boot Camp conference, in Washington, DC, the premier event in taxonomies, from its opening keynote to its closing panel. “From Cataloguer to…
Taxonomy: A Profession, Not an Industry
I am looking forward to attending and presenting at my 8th Taxonomy Boot Camp conference next week. What makes this conference special is that it is very much both a professional and a commercial/industry conference, whereas most conferences tend to be one or the other. In other words, it is…
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…
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…