Session type: Full Day Workshop

As Information Architects, we get called into projects to structure, organize, and optimize complex information systems to meet business and user goals. All too often, however, these systems are plagued by unwritten assumptions and tacit rules. Domain Modeling is an activity designed to uncover and create a shared vision of the conceptual information space—the ""Domain”—in which an organization and its users operate.

This full day, hands-on workshop will situate domain modeling in IA project contexts and interactively walk participants through two equally important domain modeling phases: identifying, defining, and validating the core concepts in the subject domain in question, and then mapping and validating the principal relationships between those concepts. We'll close the session with a discussion of putting domain models into action and using them to drive and align project activities and outcomes.

This immersive workshop provides practical tactics for designing, building, maintaining, and governing taxonomies and ontologies. Based on hard-won lessons learned from work with everything from large fortune-50 enterprises to small ecommerce sites.

The workshop provides:

• Taxonomy/Ontology basics: a foundation to start creating a consistent vocabulary within your organization. We also call out the unique needs of building a taxonomy to serve the needs of large enterprises.
• A framework for shifting to an enterprise taxonomy model that meets the needs of your enterprise and the individual business units, systems, user profiles, and interfaces.
• Discussion and activities about the impacts of a taxonomy project on technology, governance, workflows, marketing, analytics, search, compliance, and the interaction with master data management
• Practical tips for providing stakeholders with resources to navigate internal tensions around implementation
• Examples and case studies of large scale enterprise taxonomy projects.

Are you new to information architecture? This workshop teaches you the basic things you need to design digital places where information is easier to find and understand.