Taxonomies, Thesauri, and Controlled Vocabularies

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Hedden Information Management

For a major multinational investment banking and securities firm, designed a new faceted taxonomy structure for classifying documents required for new client onboarding. Interviewed stakeholders, developed taxonomy terms, mapped legacy codes to the new taxonomy, and wrote taxonomy maintenance guidelines.
For a mutual fund company, designed a new faceted taxonomy to support search refinement of enterprise-wide internal documents that were being migrated from shared drives to a new SharePoint-based intranet. Interviewed stakeholders, designed facets, developed taxonomy terms for the initial project of legal department documents, created keyword “clues” for terms to support automated indexing with ConceptSearching.
For an investment company (mutual funds and retirement planning), reviewed the proposed new taxonomy structure and made recommendations.
For a leading national retailer, revised the top two levels of product categories taxonomy to reflect product category changes and absorb new product areas, developed the taxonomy maintenance processes, and for 7 months responded to requests for additions and changes to the product taxonomy.
For an athletic wear company, developed new hierarchical sports taxonomy as part of the Unified Taxonomy with general and sports-specific vocabulary for content indexing. Interviewed stakeholders, researched terms, and built taxonomy in Excel and MultiTes.

For the Inter-American Development Bank, took interview notes, conducted content repository analysis, designed new set of taxonomy facets, and mapped legacy terms to new terms for multiple taxonomy implementations project and publication resources. (See example of Projects taxonomy.)
For the research organization Westat, designed an ontology for indexing research reports for implementation in the Smartlogic Semaphore Ontology Manager tool.
For Jackson Laboratory, took interview notes, conducted content repository analysis, and created an initial taxonomy for the web site and intranet of this biomedical research organization.
For Motorola, conducted term extraction and content analysis of its web site to support taxonomy development.
For a financial services company, created a starter taxonomy for the life goals section of a corporate intranet.
For the public web sites of a a major insurance company, conducted term extraction and content analysis to support taxonomy development.
For the intranet of a large manufacturing company, conducted term extraction and content analysis to support taxonomy development.

Reviewed the multi-faceted hierarchical taxonomy for usability and how it conforms with best practices. Analyzed retrieval statistics for taxonomy terms. Wrote recommendations for how to improve the taxonomy, and delivered visual presentation of recommendations to stakeholders.

Developed base taxonomies (totaling 1,464 node terms) in Geographies, Actions/Events, Occupations & Roles, Cultures & Languages, and Facilities & Infrastructure; and vertical market taxonomies (totaling 1,643 node terms) in Business & Finance, Politics & Government, Military & Defense, Terrorism, and Information Security; along with multiple synonyms/cross-references for each node term.. (See interface screenshot)

Edited categories of questions & answers in areas of Recreation & Sports, Electronics, Finance, Legal, Business & Careers, Animals, Pets, and Internet, by merging categories, breaking out subcategories, and renaming categories, ensuring that categories had neither too many questions to them nor were they more than three levels deep in the hierarchy. Recategorized questions & answers in the newly created categories.

Redesigned and integrated legacy web site taxonomies for content searching of the “50 Lessons” database of executive interview videos. Specified metadata for search and retrieval of video lessons and of speakers and wrote tagging guidelines. (See the Lesson Theme categories)

Mapped thousands of logged search phrases to the controlled vocabulary of a Web commercial products and services directory (Superpages.com).

Reviewed and edited hierarchical taxonomy in home and garden categories for consumer products and services for Web-based yellow pages directory. Created more narrower terms to expand the depth of select subject areas.

Edited controlled vocabulary of products and services for web-based yellow pages.

Tiny Engine Inc.

Developed of news classification taxonomy and created a total of 1142 terms in a four-level taxonomy.

Developed the three-level hierarchy of over 2500 topics and names. (See taxonomy excerpt , not live, linked through second level in all categories and third level in Animals only)

Developed two-level taxonomy of content management topics to organize resource documents on the memberships organization web site.

Expanded from a listing of only 13 web sites and one subcategory to over 90 web sites and eight subcategories