Simmons College Onsite Workshop: Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies

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Hedden Information Management

Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science

Onsite Workshop: Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies

Workshop Outline
Registration
Simmons GSLIS Workshops site (external link)

Taxonomies are becoming popular for organizing information in business knowledge management, enterprise content management systems, and intranets. Are these taxonomies different from literature retrieval thesauri? How does one go about creating a taxonomy? This workshop will provide recommended best practices for how to create terms, relationships, and variants for different kinds of taxonomies or controlled vocabularies, and will also introduce different software tools for doing so.

Whether you need to create a taxonomy to organize information on a web site, classify information in a content management system, establish a controlled vocabulary for a periodical or database indexing project, or simply understand how to use taxonomies better, this workshop will get you on your way.

Workshop Outline

1. Introduction

In what various applications taxonomies and thesauri are used
Definitions of controlled vocabulary, thesaurus, taxonomy, and ontology
Deciding when categories or alphabetical organization should be dominant

2. Creating & Wording of Terms

Choosing the preferred term wording and format
Degree of pre-coordination vs. post-coordination
Term notes and attributes

3. Non-Preferred Terms

Types of non-preferred terms
How many non-preferred terms to create
Non-preferred terms for named entities

4. Creating Term Relationships

Broader term / Narrower term relationships
Associated term relationships
Specific relationships (for ontologies)

5. Thesaurus Display Options

Flat format, multilevel hierarchy, top term, and permuted/rotated

6. Hierarchies, Categories, and Facets

Creating hierarchies
Categories within controlled vocabularies, including authority files
Facets and faceted classification

7. Software

Overview of software for creating taxonomies and thesauri
MultiTes (including demo)
Term Tree 2000 (including demo)
Freeware of TheW32 (Timothy Craven Freeware) and Protégé ontology editor
Large scale systems: Synaptica, Wordmap, Data Harmony Thesaurus Master

8. Sources for Terms

People as sources (owners, taxonomies, subject matter experts, users)
Content/material as sources
External reference sources

9. Project process

Project planning
Literature retrieval thesaurus project process
Enterprise taxonomy project process
Implementation of a controlled vocabulary
Maintenance of a controlled vocabulary

10. Related topics

Indexing & controlled vocabularies
Automated indexing & controlled vocabularies
Metadata & controlled vocabularies
Controlled vocabulary/taxonomy governance
Social tagging/folksonomies

11. Types of work available and marketing

Full time permanent jobs
Free-lance work

12. Resources

Bibliography
Organizations
Discussion groups
Workshops, seminars
Web sites

Registration

Simmons Continuing Education online registration form (external link)
Please indicate "onsite" in the course name.

Cost is $220 full price, or $175for Simmons GSLIS alumni.
Payment may be made by credit card, electronic bank payment, or check.

If paying by check, make it out to “Simmons College” and mail it to:

Kris Liberman, Program Manager
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
The Office of Continuing Education
Simmons College
300 The Fenway
Boston, MA 02115-5898
P: 617-521-2803
F: 617-521-3192
gslisce@simmons.edu

All registration questions should be directed to Kris Liberman.

Continuing Education/Professional Development

All enrolled attendees will receive a Certificate of Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for one unit, which will be mailed to them after the workshop.

Simmons College provides Professional Development Points (PDPs) according to the Massachusetts Department of Education requirements for certification revised as of 7/1/00. Attendees who request PDPs for (re)certification will earn 7 PDPs for this one-day workshop

Comments from Past Students

Instructor was great. Made a seemingly dry but important subject interesting. Enjoyed her exercises and student interaction.

It was well structured and very well targeted towards me: the information professional who needed to understand these terms and standards more precisely.

Good overview of the general topic.

It was high-value all around.