Celebrating 20 years of taxonomy at Taxonomy Boot Camp 2025
Successful taxonomy projects depend on more than good planning. They require shared understanding, clear communication, and well-defined scope and expectations.
To celebrate 20 years of taxonomy, at Taxonomy Boot Camp 2025, a special co-located event with KMWorld 2025, several experts in the field held their session, “20 Years of Taxonomy: Language Shifts and Lessons Learned,” to share insights and examine how language has evolved.
Chantal Schweitzer, practice director, strategic data services, Pivotree discussed how to spot common failure points, and how to avoid them with strong project sponsorship, project management, and stakeholder engagement.
She started off the session with an overview of her lessons learned, this includes:
- An executive project sponsor: The project needs a leader who will encourage the project, be a partner in change management to ensure the data project is socialized and adopted.
- Stakeholder engagement: It’s essential to identify all the roles/people that will use the taxonomy and understand how they will be impacted.
- A great project manager and taxonomist: A taxonomy project cannot be successful without an amazing project manager who watches the timeline/scope of the project and can communicate any issues that may arise.
- Alignment on project goals: What is the purpose of this taxonomy? How will this taxonomy drive efficiency? How will this taxonomy connect to profitability?
- Alignment on terminology: Make sure everyone is on the same page for the language being used in the taxonomy project.
Outlining taxonomy best practices is the best place to start to drive home why the project is being done, she said.
“It’s important to make sure people know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Schweitzer said.
Melissa Knudtson Monsalve, taxonomy consultant, Dovecot Studio and Stephanie Duncan, taxonomy consultant, Dovecot Studio, explored the shifts in vocabulary in the last 20 years and its impact on communication, alignment, and adoption.
Taxonomy has a terminology problem, Monsalve said. Both Monsalve and Duncan created a dataset with all publicly available Taxonomy Boot Camp themes to look back and how things have changed over 20 years.
There have been shifts in terms (concepts and their labels) across different people and trends. One of the notable patterns is “talking about how we don’t know what we’re talking about,” Duncan said.
There’s a spectrum of knowledge organization systems starting with lists, synonym rings, taxonomy, thesaurus.
“There are lots of different conceptions from a lot of different people and none of them are wrong,” Duncan said.
Folksonomies were in TBC talks since the beginning of Taxonomy Boot Camp, peaking in 2009. After 2013 this theme isn’t attributable and is now known as tagging.
Controlled vocabularies appeared in 2010-2011. Taxonomies and thesauri still make up 85% of the themes in TBC. However, thesauri aren’t as popular as taxonomy, according to Duncan.
Enterprise as a descriptor is a mainstay of the conference, Monsalve said. Dimensions to consider when defining how enterprise is used in the context of TBC includes content, audiences of content, and systems with this content. Another consideration is comprehensiveness.
“Usual our clients land on multiple, multiple departments, etc.,” Monsalve said.
AI has been talked about for a long time and reflects its general upward trend in the world. There’s machine learning, deep processing, and more. Ethics stays flat during this time, Monsalve said.
Recurring series/formats over time include Pecha Kucha (2009-2012), The Curious Lives of Taxonomists (2010-2015), Stump the Taxonomist (2017-2024), and taxonomy 101 workshop (2017-2025).
KMWorld returned to the J.W. Marriott in Washington D.C. on November 17-20, with pre-conference workshops held on November 17.
KMWorld 2025 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences, which also includes Enterprise Search & Discovery, Enterprise AI World, Taxonomy Boot Camp, and Text Analytics Forum.