Upcoming Speaking Events
“Connecting Users to Content with Taxonomies: An Introduction to Taxonomy Design and Creation” Full-day workshop
Description: This workshop teaches taxonomy creation principles with a focus on serving users. It presents best practices in designing taxonomies, including the principles of wording of terms, sources for terms, incorporating synonyms, creating relationships between terms, and designing hierarchies and facets. Other topics include taxonomy project planning, sources for terms, and taxonomy testing. Exercises and software demos will also be included.
Date: Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm EDT
Organizer: The Information Architecture Conference
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Registration: Registration link. $650, separate from the conference, for which additional registration is not required
Course description page (on this site)
Conference site description page
“Tips for Designing Taxonomy Facets”
Description: Facets have become a common taxonomy design structure. While faceted taxonomies are someone intuitive and simple, there are various tips and best practices for designing them. This presentation will start out defining “facet” and their background in faceted classification, showing examples of faceted taxonomies, and explaining how they work with search functions, and then provide several tips for designating good facets. This presentation will also explain how a taxonomy structured as facets differs from facet-like attributes which are used to further refine specific taxonomy categories.
Date: Wednesday, June 18, 10:00 – 10:45 am EDT (14:00 – 14:45 BST)
Organizer: Taxonomy Boot Camp London
Format: Virtual (Zoom with live Q&A)
Registration: Registration link. £95 is for the single half-day event (comprising 5 presentations), or £249 for all three half-day installments (March 12, June 18, and October 8). Recordings will also be available.
Book Sale and Signing Events
Heather Hedden signs copies of The Accidental Taxonomist, offered for sale at a conference discount at many of the conferences at which she speaks. Some conferences, such as KMWorld, have a book sale table. At other conferences listed above, Heather Hedden will have a few books along to sell and sign when meeting informally at the conference.
Heather Hedden will have on hand a few copies for sale at the Information Architecture Conference in Philadelphia, April 29 – May 2, 2025.