Revisiting Taxonomies: Topics in Taxonomy Design

SOLD OUT

Creating a taxonomy is not difficult, but creating a good taxonomy that is ideally suited for its use can be more challenging, and requires training and/or experience. Even those experienced in creating taxonomies often face challenges with new taxonomy projects. (That’s what makes taxonomy creation always interesting.) Rather than a repeat of last year’s taxonomy workshop, this workshop includes some review of the fundamentals, but quickly moves on to a deeper discussion of specific taxonomy design issues. This intermediate-advanced workshop proposes best practices and guidance for making decisions, including determining:

• How best to engage stakeholders

• What kind of taxonomy structure to create

• Whether to create one or more separate taxonomies for different users

• Whether a given hierarchy should stand alone as its own taxonomy or be a top term within a larger taxonomy

• Whether named entities should be narrower concepts to their category type or in a separate list

• Whether and when it’s OK to not strictly follow hierarchical relationships standards

• If customized semantic relationships (features of an ontology) should be included and how

Criteria to consider when reviewing an existing taxonomy for revision will also be presented. Finally, we will also look at examples of taxonomies and discuss how they can be improved.