Resources: Past Presentations
Past Presentations on Taxonomies or Controlled Vocabularies given at indexing conferences or by SIG members elsewhere.
National conferences of the American Society
for Indexing
ASI chapter conferences, meetings,
and workshops
Conferences of affiliated indexing societies in other countries
Other conferences with presentations by SIG members
National conferences of the American Society for Indexing
ASI 39th Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, May 24-26, 2007
Pre-conference Workshop 2: Creating Taxonomies and Controlled
Vocabularies
Presenter: Fred Leise, ContextualAnalysis, LLC
Users face many problems when trying to find information on a website
or Intranet. They are often overwhelmed with long lists of search results
or are stopped in their tracks when their searches produce no results
at all. This workshop will help you understand the importance of proper
taxonomy and controlled vocabulary (CV) development and will provide you
with methods and techniques for creating taxonomies. We will cover such
topics as: uses and roles of taxonomies; a user-centric methodology for
creating CVs; understanding business, user and content contexts; validation
techniques; and governance and maintenance issues.
Breakout Session 3: Matching Authorities and Presentation: Pre-
and Post-Coordinate Indexing
Presenter: Patricia B. Carlson, Alexander Street Press, LLC
Indexing term styles may be pre- or post-coordinate, but so may index
presentations. Significant issues can arise when terms are mismatched
to presentation, in both the print and online environments. This talk
examines the choice of authority/terminology and the presentation of terms
to enhance the usability of an index.
Breakout Session 6: Use of Indexes in Social Networking Applications
Presenter: Ilana Kingsley, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Social networking tools, such as blogs, wikis, bookmarking, and tagging
have become mainstream Web applications. This presentation will give an
overview of social networking tools that use indexes or index-like systems.
Breakout Session 9: Student Research Habits and the Future of
Subject Indexing
Presenter: Mary L. Onorato, Thomson Gale
How do online database publishers investigate the research habits of students
in post-secondary institutions, and what have they discovered? What might
be the implications of these findings for the future of subject indexing?
A product manager from Thomson Gale reviews the results of a recent market
research project and discusses various ways these results can impact decisions
about subject indexing.
ASI 38th Annual Meeting and joint meeting with the Indexing and Abstracting Society fo Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, June 15-17, 2006
Pre-conference Workshop 5: Developing Enterprise Taxonomies
Presenter: Seth Earley, Earley & Associates
With their existing skills and experience, indexers can development taxonomies
that address a variety of challenges that organizations face when trying
to make intranet and web content more accessible to users. In this session,
you'll learn how to position yourself and your capabilities to take on
more consulting projects in the areas of content and knowledge management.
What are the ways that taxonomies can be applied to search and navigation
problems? What is the structure of a taxonomy project? Using hands-on
exercises and case examples, this session will deliver high-value, actionable,
and tangible tips on taxonomy development and application of metadata
to problems of content and concerns about document and knowledge management.
Specific topics include how to derive project requirements, auditing sources
for taxonomy terms, dealing with ambiguous terms, faceted classification,
best practices and rules of thumb for construction and validation of the
taxonomy, and how different taxonomies can be mapped through associative
term relationships.
Breakout Session 5: Indexing and Bilingual Thesaurus Construction
Presenter: Meral Alakus
Meral will explore the challenges that are unique to designing thesauri
in multilingual environments, as well as related challenges in book and
journal indexing, database indexing, and Web indexing. She will also explore
a special bilingual thesaurus project in both Turkish and English languages
on women's studies called the "Women's Thesaurus."
Breakout Session 12: The Process of Building Taxonomies
Presenter: Seth Earley, Earley & Associates
Taxonomy development involves an emphasis on user tasks and an understanding
of various audience perspectives, as well as their contexts and processes.
In this session, we'll go through the steps to deriving a taxonomy and
explore case examples in taxonomy development.
Breakout Session 14: Designing for Online Findability
Presenter: Fred Brown
In this hands-on workshop, we take a vacation from the high-pressure world
of book indexing to explore how indexing principles can assist website
and intranet users find information. We explore six proven strategies.
The focus is on tools for individual web and intranet sites using such
techniques as labeling, hypertext links, web indexing, taxonomies, metadata,
and topic maps. We begin by cruising websites in different countries before
having some "play time" by designing navigation aids ourselves.
ASI 37th Annual Meeting, Pasadena, CA, May 12-14, 2005
Preconference Workshop 3: Introduction to Metadata and Controlled
Vocabularies
Presenter: Fred Leise, Conceptual Analysis, LLC
Metadata and controlled vocabularies provide users with improved search
results. This basic workshop is an introduction to using the indexing
skills of content analysis and term selection to expand the indexer’s
expertise to encompass creating controlled vocabularies. Participants
will learn what metadata is and how it is used, as well as how controlled
vocabularies are developed in the context of content management systems.
The workshop includes a number of hands-on exercises.
Preconference Workshop 7: Practical Design of Controlled Vocabularies
Presenter: Fred Leise, Conceptual Analysis, LLC
This advanced workshop introduces a user-centered methodology for creating
controlled vocabularies. Through hands-on exercises, participants will
explore the specifics of the methodology (e.g., content analysis and initial
vocabulary development, including free-listing and card-sorting) and will
begin to actually build a controlled vocabulary based on a corpus of sample
content. This workshop can be taken as a stand-alone, but participants’
learning experience will be enriched if they also take Fred’s morning
workshop, which is a comprehensive introduction to the concepts and terminology
used in the afternoon workshop.
Word Association Testing and Thesaurus Construction
Presenter: Louise Spiteri, School of Library and Information Studies,
Dalhousie University
This presentation is targeted to an audience familiar with the principles
of thesaurus construction. It examines the use of word association tests
to generate user-derived descriptors, descriptor hierarchies, and categories
of inter-term relationships. Thirty Library and Information Science practitioners
were asked to provide response words for 15 stimulus terms and to describe
how the response and stimulus terms are inter-related. The word association
test successfully generated a set of user-derived descriptors. Participants
identified 20 types of inter-term relationships, the most commonly cited
of which are Type, Part, Synonym, Activity, and Tool. Word association
tests can be used to examine how users group and inter-relate terms they
commonly associate with any given concept.
ASI 36th Annual Meeting, Alexandria, VA, May 13-15, 2004
Pre-Conference Workshop: Thesaurus Workshop
Presenter: Bella Haas Weinberg
Thesaurus Design for Semantic Information Management is a full-day workshop
that introduces the design of controlled vocabularies for indexing and
searching. Topics to be covered include semantic relationships, thesaurus
format, screen display, and the conversion of the cross-references of
frequently revised books to thesaurus structure. There will be a hands-on
exercise during the workshop. Computer-assisted techniques of thesaurus
development and natural language search strategies will be discussed (but
not demonstrated).
Poster Session 4:Indexing and Vocabulary Development
Presenter: Susan Kelsch
Indexing and thesaurus development are long-standing topics of discussion
in library and information science graduate programs. However, these have
taken on new importance with the emergence of document processing techniques
and the ongoing debate about the use of the Internet in retrieving and
delivering information. This poster will identify university researchers
and projects that focus on indexing and thesaurus construction.
Plenary Session: Enterprise-Wide Taxonomies
Presenter: Denise Bedford, World Bank
The World Bank will share its experience working with and harmonizing
different types of taxonomies to create an enterprise-wide logical and
physical taxonomy architecture. We’ll also look at how this approach
can help you to manage your content, while still maintaining the flexibility
you need to integrate future advances in information technology.