Taxo Update: Latest in Designing & Maintaining Taxonomies
Half-day interactive online/virtual workshop
Organizer: Computers in Libraries
Date: Monday, March 22, 2021, 1:00-4:00 pm ET
Description: Librarians 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 shares best practices tips on designing and maintaining taxonomies for practical use as well as the latest thinking and tools in the industry. 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. Topics include: choosing the right type of taxonomy or controlled vocabulary, taxonomy standards, sources for additional concepts to enhance a taxonomy, best practices for concept labels and relationships, designing hierarchies and facets, maintenance and governance, linking taxonomies, and taxonomy management software, as well as recent trends in taxonomies.
Interactive exercises and live Q&A are included.
Registration link. $199
Taxonomy and Metadata Design
Two half-day series interactive online/virtual workshop
Oganizer: Technology Transfer – Advanced IT training
Date: 8-hour workshop over two days: Monday-Tuesday, March 29-30, 2021, 14:00 – 18:00 CET; 10:00am – 2:00pm ET each day
Description:
A core part of a knowledge management or content management plan is an integrated taxonomy and metadata strategy. Content that is tagged with metadata, supported by a taxonomy, becomes more manageable, findable, discoverable, and sharable. Metadata is broader than a taxonomy, but a taxonomy is deeper than metadata alone.
Taxonomies and descriptive metadata should be designed in combination. Taxonomies and metadata also need to be designed to best represent the unique content set and its particular users. A licensed taxonomy from an external source is rarely appropriate. This one-day seminar provides the basics in best practices for designing and building a taxonomy and a broader descriptive metadata schema that supports findability and discoverability.
This seminar considers all implementation of metadata and taxonomies, whether for internal/enterprise knowledge management or for customer-facing Web content management, whether for manual or auto-tagging, and whether in a content management system, document management system, digital asset management system, SharePoint, or an internally developed database.
What you will learn
- The types, benefits, uses of taxonomies
- How to determine what kind of taxonomy is right for your implementation
- What resources to use in developing a taxonomy
- How to design a set of metadata properties that will be appropriately usable and useful
- How to develop taxonomy terms/metadata values and synonyms that best serve the users
- How to correctly structure hierarchical relationships between taxonomy terms
- How to design a faceted taxonomy with consideration of the user interface
- What should be included in a taxonomy/metadata governance plan
- What software tools are available for taxonomy management
Main Topics
- Metadata and controlled vocabulary definitions, types, uses, and standards
- Tagging and categorizing
- Planning and design of metadata and taxonomy
- Developing terms, synonyms, and hierarchical relationships
- Taxonomy structural design: hierarchical and faceted
- Taxonomy implementations, displays, search integration, multilingual options, and interoperability
- Taxonomy management software
Interactive exercises and live Q&A are included.
Registration link. Multi-day workshop price: €600
Connecting Users to Content: An Introduction to Taxonomy Design & Creation
Three-day series (2 hours/day) interactive online/virtual workshop
Organizer: IAC (Information Architecture Conference)
Date: 6-hours over three days: Wednesday-Friday, April 21-23, 2021, 2:00-4:00 pm ET each day
Description:
Taxonomies have evolved from classification systems to adaptable interactive tools to link users to desired content on websites, intranets, and web applications. 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, sources for terms, and taxonomy testing. The workshop will also include practical exercises and access to taxonomy management software.
Outline:
- Introduction to taxonomies
- Types and uses
- Taxonomies and metadata
- Taxonomy integration with search
- Categories and tags
- Term creation
- Term relationships
- Structural design: hierarchies
- Structural design: facets
- Taxonomy project planning and steps
- Software
- Tagging with a taxonomy
Interactive exercises and live Q&A are included.
Registration link. Multi-day workshop price: $200 ($75 for students)
