Taxonomy is a hot topic—but metadata and controlled vocabularies are not. In a recent U.S. government survey, 60% of Web managers said they don’t think metadata is necessary. Won’t your controlled vocabulary work be lost anyway when you replace your old search engine with a Google appliance? Do you know what a taxonomy really is, and what it takes to put one into action? And, do you really need one? This tutorial will answer fundamental questions about what a taxonomy is and what’s involved in building and deploying a taxonomy.

Interface stands on the shoulders of infrastructure, user experience relies on information architecture, and the biggest problem on today’s Web sites and intranets is findability. Peter Morville covers information architecture from top to bottom, explaining how search and navigation systems can be designed to support and shape user behavior. Attendees will learn the concepts, methods, and tools needed to practice information architecture successfully and discuss the relationships between taxonomies, metadata, search engines, and the user experience.

Many people talk about integrating search and taxonomy, but how do they really work together? This workshop examines the details of successfully integrating your existing taxonomies with intranet search and discusses understanding user needs; building and managing a multipurpose taxonomy; when to use subsets for search; using your taxonomy to support advanced search features; query expansion, synonym control, search index integration, semantic search; integrating your UI; and displaying your taxonomy with search results.

A well-built taxonomy connecting search queries to relevant content in databases is a fundamental part of the information architecture underlying Web sites and corporate intranets. This workshop provides a comprehensive introduction or skills refresher on taxonomy construction for precise, consistent information retrieval. Using multiple hands-on exercises,
attendees will develop the skills and confidence to build taxonomies for corporate, government, and other sectors.

Learn the fundamentals about enterprise search engines and get prepared for the intense, in-depth sessions you’ll hear at the conference. Acquire a foundation on how search engines work, from indexing to the actual search to the results display. This workshop covers robot spiders, index structures, simple query parsing, retrieval, relevance ranking, and designing usable search interfaces. It explores the three core aspects of enterprise search: search functionality, content searchability, and interface.

Taxonomy, metadata, search and navigation are interrelated elements that combine to deliver the right information to users when they need it. Putting these elements together is like solving multiple jigsaw puzzles with a lot of extra pieces. This workshop discusses how to build an effective content management strategy based on these various components, all of which support improved search and findability. It will explore typical problems including tagging and indexing, CMS and search engine integration, and navigational hierarchies versus classification taxonomies.