Upcoming conference workshops on taxonomy creation:
Connecting Users to Content:
An Introduction to Taxonomy Design & Creation
Half-day interactive online/virtual workshop
Organizer: EuroIA (the Information Architecture conference of Europe)
Date: Wednesday, September 23, 16:00 – 19:30 CET; 10:00 am – 1:30 pm EDT.
Location: Virtual
Workshop fee: €249 (includes conference registration: access to all live talks and pre-recorded content) €109 for students
Registration
Workshop Description
Taxonomies have evolved from classification systems to adaptable interactive tools to link users to desired content on websites. Taxonomies are not the same as a website’s navigation and can do a lot more. Taxonomies can provide guiding categories of topics, suggested search terms, aspects for faceted search, or topics for sorting and filtering results. To be truly helpful, however, taxonomies need to be well designed to suit the users and use cases, be customized to the content, and conform to taxonomy best practices and standards so that they are easy and intuitive to use.
This workshop teaches taxonomy creation principles and addresses the issues of designing a taxonomy to serve users. It presents best practices in designing taxonomies, including the principles of wording of terms, incorporating synonyms, creating relationships between terms, and designing hierarchies and facets. Other topics include taxonomy project planning, support for tagging, and considerations for taxonomy governance and maintenance. The workshop will also include practical exercises and demo the use of taxonomy management software.
Key takeaways:
- How taxonomies can enhance search and findability
- What sources to use for developing taxonomy terms and the recommended process
- How to create terms, their synonyms, and relationships, according to best practices
- How to design hierarchies and facets
How to govern and maintain a taxonomy
Designing & Maintaining Practical Taxonomies
Half-day pre-conference workshop
Organizer: Computers in Libraries
Date: Postponed date TBD, spring 2021
Location: Hyatt Regency Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia (Just one mile from Washington Reagan National Airport)
Workshop fee: $199
Workshop Description
Information professionals are increasingly finding reasons to create taxonomies or related knowledge organization systems. They may need to classify a special collection or local archives, develop a thesaurus to index a local or institutional periodical, create a controlled vocabulary for tagging pages or posts in a web content management system, or merely categorize a large collection of resource links. This workshop provides instruction and best practices tips on designing and maintaining taxonomies for practical use. Design considerations include whether to create a taxonomy or thesaurus; whether a taxonomy should be primarily hierarchical or faceted; how large it should be; whether synonyms/variants are needed and if so, how many; what the sources are for the terms; and what the guidelines are for properly creating hierarchical relationships.
Workshop Outline
- Introduction, definitions, types, uses, benefits
- Creation and wording of terms
- Sources for terms
- Synonyms, alternative labels, non-preferred terms
- Term relationships
- Structural design: hierarchies and facets
- Maintenance and governance
- Taxonomy management software
