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.

In a full room at 8am this morning, after a lively evening   networking session on Yaksonomy: Talking about Taxonomies, the hardy TBC audience avidly listed to Theresa Regli of CMS Watch, talk about whether taxonomies are dying, dead or just hitting their stride.  My business partner, Rebecca Jones, Program Chair for TBC, just posted more info about the session.  And watch for lots more blog posts from TBC speaker and blogger, Daniela Barbosa of Dow Jones and download the Taxonomy Boot Camp puzzles she created for the event.  Wicked!

Busy morning at the San Jose Convention Center for KMWorld & Intranets 2008. Dave Snowden & Mary Boone are leading a full day workshop on the “Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”. Theresa Regli is discussing enterprise search technology. Lots of workshops about building taxonomies, integrating taxonomies and auto-categorization supporting the Taxonomy Boot Camp event which begins on Wednesday evening. James Robertson focuses his workshop on strategies for innovative intranets and Peter Morville on information architecture 3.0. Ann Rockley is leading a workshop on content management strategies. More workshops will get underway this afernoon.