Fran Alexander: Democratizing Taxonomy Practice – Episode 202

Content Strategy Insights

Fran Alexander There is always more taxonomy work to be done than there are practitioners to do it. Fran Alexander's solution to this imbalance is to democratize taxonomy practice. Fran's work actually spans the full range of semantic practices, from simple term lists to taxonomies, thesauruses, and ontologies and knowledge graphs. Wherever she's working in this span of activities, she's always happy to bring other practitioners along with her. We talked about: the transition in the taxonomy world from building taxonomies to help machines understand humans to building taxonomies to help humans understand machines he the rise of AI and LLMs has highlighted the importance of well-structured knowledge and good semantic layers the hierarchical progression of knowledge organization from simple lists to full-blown ontologies how her efforts to democratize taxonomy and semantic practice are jump-started by humans' innate organizing schemes how the fact that there is always more semantic work to be done than there are taxonomists drives the need to democratize the craft how to evaluate the effectiveness of a taxonomy fascinating taxonomic edge cases like boundary objects that highlight the artistic aspects of taxonomy science how an ontology "is a map of important ideas" two main types of taxonomies - descriptive taxonomies and operational taxonomies how to assess whether a taxonomy is doing the work you need it to typical uses cases for a taxonomy: tagging, indexing, discovery, retrieval, recommendation systems, personalization, etc. some advanced taxonomy practices that enterprises could benefit from the connections between taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs the Taxonomy Bootcamp London Bite-sized Taxonomy Boot Camp series Fran's bio Fran started her career as a writer and editor of dictionaries and thesauruses in the UK, and, as technology evolved, she specialised in information architecture, search systems, and digital archives, and more recently, the use of semantics in knowledge graphs and LLM applications. Having worked on reference publications including the Collins English Dictionary, and as Taxonomy Manager for the BBC Archive, she now lives in Montreal, Canada, and is the Senior Taxonomist for Expedia Group. She was Taxonomy Bootcamp London's Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year 2023. Connect with Fran online LinkedIn Resource mentioned in this interview Bite-sized Taxonomy Boot Camp Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/SoxApp_myeg Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 202. As we write our shopping lists and organize our thoughts, we all practice taxonomy and think semantically every day. Some of us get to do these practices professionally. Fran Alexander is a taxonomist based in Montreal. She's also the reigning Taxonomy Bootcamp Practitioner of the Year. As she's realized that there will always be more semantic work to be done than there are trained practitioners, she added "democratizing taxonomy" to her to-do list. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 202 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Fran Alexander. Fran is a taxonomist based in Montreal, in Canada. She's also the reigning Taxonomy Boot Camp Practitioner of the Year, so she's a rock star in the taxonomy world. Welcome, Fran. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Fran: Well, thanks, Larry. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to talk to you about taxonomies and democratizing taxonomies. One thing that's top of mind for me, and it gives a bit of context, I think to the work that I've done and the changes that I've seen over, well, the last couple of decades really, is that we used to build taxonomies to help machines understand humans.