The Rise of Taxonomy: What you need to know today

A taxonomy sorts information into useful buckets. This categorization process makes information more usable–it improves navigation, retrieval, and search for your users. But most of us aren’t trained as taxonomists, so how can we ensure that we produce a useful classification system? In this presentation, Lief provides guidance on how to create and work with a taxonomy in your organization. He’ll touch on faceted search, managing taxonomy in the enterprise, and the unexpected challenges that may arise. After a year spent working on a taxonomy for DITA Open Toolkit and other projects, he’ll provide some best (and worst) practices for building classification systems.

What can the audience expect to learn?

As groups are being asked to integrate their work with each other taxonomies help identify overlaps and differences. These overlaps and differences can lead to important discussions to streamline business processes. Attendees will take away an understanding of how to use a taxonomy to benefit their team(s) and work.

Meet the presenter


Lief is a technical consultant at Scriptorium. His content strategy work often focuses on content operations—how your content will be authored and later consumed by people and machines. Enterprise search, findability, accessibility, automation, and process simplification are particular areas of interest for him. In 2019, he earned his master’s degree in content strategy.

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