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About Heather

Hedden Information Management

American Society for Indexing Annual Conference

Pre-Conference Workshop: Taxonomy and Thesaurus Creation

Thursday, April 30, 2008
Warwick Hotel, 1776 Grant Street, Denver, Colorado

7:00 am - 8:00 am: Continental breakfast
8:00 am - 5:30 pm: Workshop

10:15 am - 10:30 am: Morning Refreshment Break
12:00 noon - 1:30 pm: Lunch Break (on your own)
3:00 pm - 3:15 pm: Afternoon Refreshment Break

Taxonomies and thesauri are structured sets of terms used for indexing or categorizing content. They are used in a wide variety of applications ranging from periodical indexing, image archive management, enterprise content management, commercial product categorization, online news service interfaces, and web site information architecture. There is a growing demand for people who can create and manage taxonomies, and indexers already have many of the basic skills.

This one-day workshop will provide the additional information and some of the practice needed for those with indexing or library science backgrounds to start working on taxonomies and thesauri. Short practical exercises will be interspersed among many of the topics. This workshop takes a broader approach from past conference workshops on taxonomies, which were focused on enterprise taxonomies. This workshop also includes for the first time demonstrations of thesaurus software packages affordable for freelancers.

1. Introduction

• In what various applications taxonomies and thesauri are used
• How creating them is similar and different to book indexing
• 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 voabularies, including authority files
• Facets and faceted classification

7. Software

• Overview of software for creating taxonomies and thesauri
• Demonstration of MultiTes
• Demonstration of Webchoir TCS-10
• Demonstration of Term Tree 2000
• 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 vocabulaires
• 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

Participants will be engaged in discussion and asked questions. Demonstrations of different software will be provided. Limited post-workshop feedback will be offered to participants who subsequently e-mail to the instructor taxonomy excerpts they have created.