As VP of MarComm, Heather Kotula’s role encompasses presence at industry events, organizing the annual Data Harmony Users Group (DHUG) meetings, oversight of the website, blog, and social media, organizing webinars, and public relations activities. Heather has been active in taxonomy works, including creating, implementing, and oversight of several taxonomies including medical databases and the original AOL taxonomy supporting their search for many years. She is active on the professional side of the industry, having served many positions including President of the SLA Taxonomy Community. She is known for her creative presentations and publications at professional societies. She has presented at several SLA conferences for the Community, as well as presenting at Taxonomy Boot Camp. She is a recently elected member of the SLA Board of Directors. She is also active in the Society for Scholarly Publishing, serving on the Marketing Committee.

Look Before You Leap: Taxonomy is a Foundational Technology for Natural Language Processing

Co-presented with: Margie Hlava

Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Generative AI are hot news – or are they? Access Innovations has been working with artificial intelligence since 1978, and we’ve learned a thing or two. One of them is to start with the basics, and taxonomy is a foundational technology for NLP, which supports AI. Join taxonomy experts Margie Hlava and Heather Kotula for a half day, lightning speed tutorial on all things taxonomy, including how it drives productivity for journal production and researcher output, how it supports member organizations in conference planning and business analytics, and more.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• What is a taxonomy
• Where you can use a taxonomy to create value for an organization – eg, drive revenue and increase customer satisfaction
• How a taxonomy underpins AI, NLP, and associated systems The difference between taxonomy, thesaurus and ontology