Clients & Projects

Selected Past Taxonomy Clients and Projects

Heather Hedden has engaged in the following taxonomy projects for clients since 2008, the most recent listed first. Some projects contracted through other consultancies are not listed here. A complete resume is available upon request.

Mastercard

  • Built a hierarchical taxonomy for the “My Data” platform
  • contributed to aligning the taxonomy with the data glossary
  • Develop additional glossary terms and definitions
  • Documented the taxonomy

Mind Alliance

  • Developed a taxonomy on COVID-related topics and improved the existing faceted taxonomy for finding legal articles
  • Developed a faceted taxonomy for the subject area of sales.

International Labour Organization

  • Developed business taxonomy for SharePoint intranet by performing content audit and analysis, interviewing stakeholders, defining use cases, leading user testing
  • Created and updated the taxonomy in PoolParty semantic software
  • Merged the business taxonomy with the existing website taxonomy
  • Documented the taxonomy and wrote tagging guidelines

Wolters Kluwer Financial Services

  • Refined faceted taxonomy for search and retrieval in financial services regulatory updates database.
  • Reviewed mappings of terms to a customer taxonomy.

Berklee College of Music – Music and Health Institute Research Collection

  • Developed categorized hierarchical taxonomy for manual indexing of research articles on music and pain, based on content analysis and user interviews, to supplement existing indexing with Medical Subject Headings.
  • Wrote indexing guidelines and incorporated indexer feedback.

PicMonkey

  • Edited and put existing keywords into a faceted taxonomy with some hierarchy, including some alternative labels (synonyms), for both tagging and retrieval graphical design templates.
  • For an interim period, classified new assets with the taxonomy, updated the taxonomy with new terms, and created search queries to taxonomy terms from SEO/browse categories.

Chalk Talk Solutions Inc.

  • Defined and specified metadata and attributes.
  • Provided input to taxonomies and metadata requirements document.

Chronicle of Higher Education

  • Refined and edited hundreds of disciplines, areas of study, and higher education specialties for the Vitae higher education job search site.
  • Added search strings as new or synonym terms.

Goodsearch LLC (Goodshop)

  • Revised the product category hierarchy and added a third level of categories for this retail coupon website.

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts

  • Developed a new faceted taxonomy from scratch for web content management for implementation in Adobe Experience Manager for public websites of hotels and hotel franchisee intranet.

TechTarget

  • Recruited and coordinated the work of four freelance taxonomists in developing multiple information technology (IT) taxonomies for the purpose of autoclassifying technical articles.
  • Consulted on the development of taxonomy guidelines.

Quotabelle

  • Developed a faceted taxonomy for a webnsite collection of quotes.

KAPS Group, LLC

  • Developed and refined topical taxonomies in economic, financial and social development subjects to be used in new knowledge management portal for the retrieval of research and project reports for the World Bank.
  • Contributed to the taxonomy plan document for taxonomies to be implemented on the websites of various state departments of transportation.

Pearson Education

  • Developed taxonomies for 8 world languages and language methods, based on textbook tables of contents for Pearson Education’s higher education digitized content project.

SapientNitro (now Publicis Sapient)

  • Designed a faceted taxonomy structure and contributed to content strategy as part of the implementation of Endeca search for the e-commerce websites of various brands for client Abercrombie & Fitch.

Project Performance Company (acquired by DSA Inc.) (as an employed consultant)

  • 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 a leading international educational publisher, developed subject discipline taxonomies based on comparing and analyzing the detailed tables of contents in multiple textbooks for multiple courses.

Earley and Associates (now Earley Information Science)

  • 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.
  • 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 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.

Bain & Company

  • 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.

Demand Media (Wired Ivy LLC)

  • For the Answerbag Q&Q site, 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.
  • Re-categorized questions & answers in the newly created categories.

Truman Company (now HomePage Media)

  • 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.