Taxonomies organize a collection of information – structured or unstructured – and they underpin search in many applications. Taxonomy 101 provides the basics for knowledge organization, outlining “nuts and bolts” of building a taxonomy, where to start, and where to implement it to realize the most benefit to an organization. Bring your questions and join us for this full-day, information-packed orientation. Whether you are new to taxonomy or would just like a refresher, the Taxonomy 101 workshop at the SLA Annual Conference is a great way to get a robust overview and meet others.  

The course will be at the SLA Annual Conference in Baltimore, MD, on Sunday, June 10, from 8 – 4:30,for a cost of $225 for SLA members and $415 for non-members. You can register without registering for the SLA Annual Conference. See the conference site https://www.sla.org/attend/sla-2018–annual-conference-2/ for the full course description and registration.  If interested, register now, because the workshop includes lunch and food orders will be placed soon.

Speakers are Margie Hlava and Bob Kasenchak.

Marjorie M.K. Hlava is President, Chairman, and founder of Access Innovations, Inc. in 1978.

The company provides information management services and owns the Data Harmony software for content creation, taxonomy management, metadata and entity extraction, content repositories, search, and automatic indexing.  

Active in standards, she is particularly known for her work with the thesaurus, Dublin Core, and DOI standards. Ms. Hlava is a past president of NFAIS, the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and the Board of Documentation Abstracts. She was twice a member of the Board of Directors of SLA, and a 5 year member of the Board of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Awards include ASIST’s prestigious Watson Davis Award and SLA’s John Cotton Dana award.

Margie explains why we need taxonomies in the article, “Why Do We Need Taxonomies and Thesauri?”.  To search, translate, index and browse – those are the basic uses for taxonomies.

When an organization asks for a taxonomy to be created it’s usually because they want to be able to manage a collection.

Taxonomies and thesauri are both types of controlled vocabularies. In controlled vocabularies intended for indexing, each concept covered by the vocabulary is represented by one and only one term that is valid for indexing, with some exceptions such as multilingual thesauri. If the taxonomy or thesaurus is managed consistently, searchers will get the same answers/results every time. They don’t want to get a different answer every time they do a search.

Bob Kasenchak is the Director of Product Development at Access Innovations, where he is working on the forthcoming Ontology Master product. Bob has led taxonomy development and other projects for JSTOR, McGraw-Hill, Wolters Kluwer, the American Society for Civil Engineering (ASCE), Engineering Research Education (ERE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Thesaurus (MSHT).

Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Register today.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.