Heather Hedden has been a taxonomist for over 25 years in various organizations and as an independent consultant. She currently works as a knowledge engineer at Semantic Web Company (vendor of PoolParty Semantic Suite software) and previously worked as a taxonomist at Cengage Learning, Viziant, First Wind, and Project Performance Corp. Heather has designed and developed, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and metadata schema for internal and externally published content, including websites, intranets, and content management systems. She has given workshops on taxonomy creation at numerous conferences and as corporate training.
Through Hedden Information Management she also teaches an online course in taxonomy creation. Heather is author of The Accidental Taxonomist, 3rd edition.

Taxonomies and Tagging to Connect Content Across the Enterprise

Content management systems provide support for taxonomies to tag content for retrieval within those systems. But to support the convergence of content and make it searchable and discoverable across the organization, an enterprise taxonomy is needed. This workshop provides a solid introduction to the methods and best practices for building and applying enterprise taxonomies. Methods include brainstorming, interviews, manual content analysis, and automated text extraction-based analysis. Best practices include following standards for hierarchical relationships using suitable labels and synonyms for taxonomy concepts and using the right taxonomy structures. The technology solution is to manage the taxonomy in a dedicated tool that uses standard interoperability formats and connects with other systems by APIs, with support for auto-tagging. The workshop includes interactive exercises of concept brainstorming, alternative label term and relationship creation, and tagging.

In this workshop, attendees will learn:

• The benefits of an enterprise taxonomy
• Principles of taxonomy standards
• Methods of creating an enterprise taxonomy, including involving stakeholders and merging existing taxonomies
• Best practice for taxonomy concept labels and relationship creation
• When and how to support both manual and automated tagging
• The importance of taxonomy maintenance and tagging governance

Leveraging Semantics to Provide Targeted Training Content:
A Case Study

Employee training content (whether self-paced slide decks, interactive learning, or instructor-led sessions) is not just for employee onboarding, but is also important for existing employees to gain new skills, refreshers in past skills, and learn new technologies or procedures. It can be confusing to employees to know what training is appropriate. Tagging training courses for their topics is a good start, but that supports searching for something specific. If employees need to discover relevant training content that they don’t know about, courses should also be retrieved or recommended based on other criteria, such as the employee’s job role, level, and organizational unit.
A case study is described, whereby these methods and the PoolParty platform were used in a proof-of-concept project for Google gTech which successfully demonstrated how search and discovery of training content could be improved.

In this session attendees will learn:

Ways taxonomies and semantics can improve search and discovery for training content, including improving a faceted taxonomy to make it more user-focused; semantically enriching a taxonomy with ontology-based relationships linking across roles, position levels, and skills; making topics relevant to different organizational groups; and auto-tagging training assets that lacked existing metadata.