Upcoming Speaking Events
“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.
Dublin Core Metadata Conference
October 22-15, 2025
Barcelona, Spain
Details TBA
“Taxonomies in Support of Search”
Description: Taxonomies and search have often been considered as different, competing tools for information findability. When people think of taxonomies, they might consider only displayed hierarchies or facets, and users might prefer to simply use a search box. Taxonomies, and more broadly controlled vocabularies, can support search in multiple ways, using synonyms/variants, search refinements, hierarchies, search-suggest terms in a drop-down, and a search thesaurus. The presentation will address and show examples of each of these ways that taxonomies can support search, and it will go into detail on the options for search refinements (facets). Finally, the role of AI with taxonomies and search will be discussed.
Date: Monday, November 17, 1:30 – 2:00 pm.
Organizer: Taxonomy Boot Camp
Location: JW Marriott, Washington, DC
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 DCMI conference in Barcelona in October and a full book sale and signing event at KMWorld in Washington, DC in November.