Leslie Owens, an analyst for Forrester, is this morning’s keynote at Taxonomy Boot Camp, a related conference to KMWorld & Intranets 2008.

Taxonomy impacts search in four key areas:  query pipeline, results pipeline, user/interaction analytics, indexing pipeline.

Evaluating search vendors against taxonomy criteria shows leaders including Endeca, Fast.

Information access sytems are complex and heterogeneous and include: interface, search system, content.  Enterprise search is used to crawl content, or federate to it, or leave some behind.  Not all content is equal or valuable.  Scope matters and communicating it is tricky — do you want multiple search boxes on one portal page?

So where should you invest your taxonomy effort?  With content — controlled vocabularies, browsing structures, social tagging and user profiling.  In the search system — entity extraction, custom intelligence, clustering/classification.  In the interface — navigation, facets, social tagging, user profiling.

Taxonomy coupling with search and enterprise content management (ECM) — align your taxonomy efforts with both ECM and search to fast forward your efforts.

Suggestions:  Align taxonomy initiatives with business objectives and technology investments — and show something so understanding will come.  Accept and influence your dynamic ecosystem.  Be perceptive and pertinent to the needs of your audience.  Dig in and deliver results.

Great visuals and slides here.