PhillyCHI August Meeting - Taxonomy

Date: August 23 2007

Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Website: http://phillychi.acm.org

About This Event

Time: 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
* Meet & greet from 6:00 pm - 6:30 pm *
Location: Berger Auditorium, Skirkanich Hall, University of Pennsylvania
210 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
Map: http://www.facilities.upenn.edu/mapsBldgs/view_map.php3?id=140
RSVP (not necessary, but nice): phillychi@gmail.com

Most folks know that taxonomy has something to do with organizing things.

Fewer folks know, however, that taxonomy is the practice of classification, which originally began as a science devoted to the classification of living organisms. And that over time, taxonomy has become known as the classification of just about anything and everything.

Even fewer get down into the weeds and do the work that goes beyond simple classification that makes today's information systems work: meta data, facets, controlled vocabulary, thesauri, synonym maps, ontologies, tagging…

What's troubling about this divide between those that know about taxonomy and those that don't is the very importance of taxonomy. For lots of designers & developers, the applications, websites, and interactive products they spend their waking hours creating could not function without well-structured, carefully crafted information structures.

This month's PhillyCHI meeting will explore in practical and tangible terms the specific ways taxonomy is important to the work we do. We will discuss the design, implementation, and governance of taxonomies by examining four real-world case studies:

* a user-centric catalog for a large e-commerce site and its impact on the user experience
* a content-heavy non-profit information site
* a system processing data through controlled vocabularies and thesauri
* a consumer-driven search engine

Plenty of time will be reserved at the end of the meeting for discussion, so bring your tough questions!

Panel Participants
Dave Cooksey, GSI Commerce, Inc
Emily Culbertson, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
John Ferrara, Vanguard
Julia Remick, Yellow Book USA

Sign Up!

http://phillychi.acm.org

Tags

chi, delaware, design, ia, information architecture, new jersey, nj, philadelphia, philly, phillychi, taxonomy