Upcoming 2026 Speaking Events
“Taxonomy Design” Workshop
Organizer: International ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization) Conference
Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2026, 10:00 – 12:30
Location: WZ Hotel Jardins, São Paulo, Brazil
Description: Taxonomies support website and intranet search and navigation, content and document management systems, and enterprise knowledge graphs. To serve its objectives, a taxonomy needs to be well-designed. Business and industry knowledge alone, however, is not sufficient to design a useful taxonomy. This is where the knowledge expertise of information professionals is valuable. This workshop, which includes hands-on exercises, will provide a better understanding of the needs of taxonomies for practical implementation and will focus on best practices in taxonomy design. Topics to be covered include business benefits of a taxonomy, types of taxonomies and their suitability for different uses, comparisons of a taxonomy to other knowledge organization systems, standards relevant to taxonomies, the application of thesaurus standards in creating terms and relationships, designing a taxonomy to suit both its users and the content to be tagged, and tools for developing and managing taxonomies, including the use of AI.
“Thesaurus Standards for Taxonomies” on the panel “International Standards for KOS supporting information retrieval and machine learning assessment”
Organizer: International ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization) Conference
Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Location: WZ Hotel Jardins, São Paulo, Brazil
Description: Support for search and tagging using controlled vocabularies has been the main focus of the ISO 25964 standard, Thesauri and Interoperability with other Vocabularies, but this support has recently been complicated by the rise of Generative AI. The changes in the information access and distribution as well as the usage options expansion with recent applications in daily life automation clearly impact the expanded use cases. This panel will be given by members of the committee ISO/TC 46/SC 9/WG 8 Information and documentation, for revising ISO 25964 (Thesauri and Interoperability with other knowledge organization systems). The panel will introduce ISO 25964 Part 1: Thesauri for Information Retrieval, creation, management, and use, which just completed its two years revision and released recently. It will also report the on-going revision of Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies which covers interoperability between different thesauri and with other types of knowledge organization systems (KOS). Additionally, the panel will emphasis several recent significant standardization efforts that address responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems by ISO and other organizations.
“Taxonomies and Artificial Intelligence for Finding Information“
Organizers: IA Biblio BR Grupo and FESPSP
Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Location: Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Description: Taxonomies, which are structured lists of controlled concepts used to tag content and link data, help people find digital information. Artificial intelligence, in the forms of generative AI and LLMs also help people find information. While the two methods may seem to compete, they have different benefits, especially in the user experience, and taxonomies actually support AI methods in various ways. Generative AI is also being used to know to help in the creation of taxonomies. Learn more from this presentation.
“How Taxonomies / Ontologies Drive Knowledge Management”
Organizer: Progress Data Platform Summit
Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Location: Hyatt Regency Reston, VA
Description: Taxonomies, ontologies and knowledge management increasingly overlap as organizations seek better ways to organize, connect and apply enterprise knowledge. This educational session explains how knowledge organization systems support knowledge management, why they remain relevant in the age of AI and how they can help turn scattered information into usable business context. The session will define the roles of taxonomies and ontologies, showing how they relate, differ and extend one another. It will then connect those structures to the core components of knowledge management, including knowledge creation, capture, organization, retrieval, sharing, reuse and governance.
“Taxonomy 101 Tutorial“
Organizer: Taxonomy Boot Camp conference
Date: Monday, November 16, 2026
Location: JW Marriott, Washington, DC
Description: This introductory taxonomy tutorial covers key concepts to get you up-to-speed for the rest of the conference or helps prepare you to take on a role in a taxonomy project. Topics include what taxonomies are, the various uses and benefits of taxonomies, comparisons of taxonomies with other knowledge organization systems, standards for taxonomies, taxonomy creation research and sources for concepts, the wording of concept lapels, best practices for creating hierarchical relationships, the structural design of hierarchies and facets, and brief introductions to other issues related to taxonomy management.
“SPARQL Field Guide for Taxonomists“
Organizer: Taxonomy Boot Camp conference
Date: Monday, November 16, 2026
Location: JW Marriott, Washington, DC
Description: Modern SKOS taxonomy management tools come with useful built-in reports: orphan detection, cycle detection, basic structural validation. But built-in reports cover only the questions the vendor anticipated. Working taxonomists routinely need to ask questions that no template covers, such as which concepts are missing definitions, scope notes, or alternative labels and which concepts have multiple broader concepts (polyhierarchy). This talk, presented by a taxonomist and an ontologist, is a practical field guide to using SPARQL as a custom reporting layer for SKOS taxonomies. We will walk through a working set of queries that surface the kinds of structural and content patterns taxonomists may need to see.
“Uses of GenAI and LLMs in Taxonomy Development” panel moderator
Organizer: Taxonomy Boot Camp conference
Date: Tuesday, November 17, 2026
Location: JW Marriott, Washington, DC
Description: GenAI is rapidly changing how organizations create, maintain, and apply taxonomies. In this panel discussion, practitioners from financial services, professional networking, media, educational publishing, and AI technology share their experiences using LLMs and other AI techniques to support taxonomy and ontology work. Panelists discuss applications such as term mining, taxonomy maintenance, genre and category development, structured knowledge creation, metadata enhancement, domain coverage analysis, and machine-readable knowledge representation. Hear about practical successes, implementation challenges, lessons learned, and emerging approaches for integrating AI into taxonomy workflows. Together, the panel explores how AI is reshaping taxonomy practice.
Book Sale and Signing Events
Heather Hedden signs copies of The Accidental Taxonomist, offered for sale at a conference discount at the conferences at which she speaks. Some conferences, such as KMWorld, have a book sale table. At other conferences Heather Hedden will have a few books along to sell and sign when meeting informally at the conference.
A very limited number of books will be available for sale and author signing at the ISKO conference in São Paulo in August.
A book sale and signing event will be held at KMWorld conference (with which Taxonomy Boot Camp is co-located) on Monday, November 16, in the Showcase during the Grand Opening Reception, 5:00 – 6:00 pm, which can be accessed with Enterprise Solutions Showcase pass. Register for the pass for free through October 16. After that, it is $25.