17-18 October 2017, Olympia London
25% discount for BCS-IRSG members
Last year’s inaugural Taxonomy Bootcamp London (TBCL) was a terrific success as taxonomy people from dozens of countries came together to share their stories and experiences. Now we’re doing it all over again. This year’s conference is all about showcasing the best ideas from the community for making taxonomies a powerful business asset, with the aim of making TBCL an essential event for anyone working with taxonomies, content tagging, ontologies, text analytics and more.
“There’s a real buzz around the use of taxonomies these days,” according to taxonomy, metadata and search consultant Helen Lippell, who once again is taking on the role of TBCL Conference Chair. “They are popping up as the crucial element in all sorts of places”.
The conference aims to provide case studies, insights and advice from some of the best taxonomy practitioners in the world. Some sessions will appeal to those who are getting into taxonomy for the first time, while others will be of interest to more seasoned professionals. Speakers come from a range of organisations including the BBC, Cisco, Department for Education, Government Digital Service, Hackney Borough Council, ICAEW, Pearson, Thomson Reuters, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and World Bank Group.
TBCL opens with a keynote from independent consultant Madi Weland Solomon. ‘Kick the beehive: new approaches to building taxonomies for the real world’ offers examples of what businesses are doing with ontologies and taxonomies and argues that with the rise of text mining, auto-classification, semantic technologies and graph databases, there are growing opportunities for taxonomists to make a difference.
Day two begins with a keynote from Joseph Busch, Principal Consultant at Taxonomy Strategies, who will discuss ‘AI vs. automation: the newest technologies for automatic tagging’, cutting through the AI hype to show how taxonomists can take advantage of the opportunities these technologies bring. Busch will argue that sometimes what is labelled as ‘AI’ is actually underpinned by high quality entity extraction and business rules which can therefore help automate content tagging.
Other highlights include sessions on:
- Making sense of unstructured and large data sets
- Working with large multi-faceted and multi-lingual taxonomies
- Collaborative working for website navigation projects
- Semantic models in action
- Cutting-edge taxonomy applications for content systems
- Knowledge graphs and ontologies
How we define categories and label things has a huge impact on both products and users; with that in mind, a plenary session titled ‘Language is rarely neutral: why the ethics of taxonomies matter’ assembles a panel of experts to discuss the fascinating and highly relevant topic of the ethics of taxonomies. A session on ‘Governance and stakeholder engagement’ will provide insights to help delegates manage their taxonomies with confidence.
Finally, a deeper introduction to key topics is provided by pre-conference workshops run by three experts, each of whom has published an important book on taxonomies and findability. Heather Hedden will look at Taxonomy fundamentals; Patrick Lambe will explore Scoping your taxonomy project for success, and Jeff Fried will present the Search manager’s boot camp.
Networking with like-minded professionals is an important part of the event’s appeal. “Last year’s event brought together a fantastically supportive community of peers. One of my personal highlights was being part of all the conversations during the breaks and lunches,” commented Helen Lippell.
BCS IRSG members can claim a 25% discount when registering for Taxonomy Boot Camp London. Enter priority code IRSG25 at online registration www.taxonomybootcamp.com/London