Creating Effective Taxonomy for Fast-Changing Industries

How can you tell if your taxonomy is performing well, and how can you best communicate that to stakeholders?

Daniel Hooker, senior item taxonomy analyst, Target Corp., explained how to assess taxonomy efforts in his session, “Measuring Taxonomy and Effectiveness in Fast-Changing Industries,” during his session at Taxonomy Boot Camp 2018.

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2018 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences that includes KMWorld 2018, Enterprise Search & Discovery, Text Analytics Forum ’18, and Office 365 Symposium.

Item taxonomy is designed to give each item one item type, Hooker explained. However, confusion about certain items can lead to problems.

Descriptions could change too frequently to build trust with customers, items could be too complex to be usable, or there could be a lack of visibility into a certain item.

Taxonomists have to define the customer problem and focus only on:

• Things that can be controlled such as:
  • Size, complexity, redundancy,  and relevancy,
  • Do measurements:
    • Node counts, attribute counts, requirement ratios, and item usage

Measurement leads to insight, Hooker said. With measurements in place, either manually or with AI and machine learning, businesses can provide answers.

Several guidelines to adhere to include:

• Aligning organizations language
• Help leadership understand why taxonomy is critical
• Justify priorities with data

Many presentations have already been made available online at www.taxonomybootcamp.com/2018/Presentations.aspx and others will become available after the presentations are given.

KM World 2019 will be held November 5-7, 2019 at the JW Marriott in Washington, DC, with pre-conference workshops on November 4.