Monday, 5/21/2007
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Level: Technical - Intermediate

Well-designed taxonomies are the bedrock of ontologies. As semantics and taxonomies find their way into more and more tools and applications, properly representing them becomes increasingly critical. Simply exchanging spreadsheets of terms is no longer adequate. If taxonomies are to be suitable for use as the building blocks of ontologies, they must be represented in a manner that facilitates interoperability, integration, reuse, and rich semantics. In other words, they must be structured with XML. Each step in the progression from simple term list to fully realized ontologies adds levels of complexity that many organizations are not equipped to deal with. This session will introduce the basic concepts, tools and techniques for using XML to structure and manage taxonomies in a manner that will allow organizations to move into the semantic world at their own pace without losing their current investment in taxonomies. The session will include:

• Creating a taxonomy strategy for semantics
• Representing Taxonomies in XML, RDF, and OWL
• Using XSLT to translate and integrate taxonomies
• Balancing semantic capabilities against markup overhead
• XML standards such as Zthes and SKOS

Darin Stewart is Director of Research Information Services for Oregon Health & Science University and Principal of Nexial Group consulting. He is also a member of the Applied Information Management faculty at the University of Oregon where he teaches Taxonomy, Metadata and Information Asset Management. He is a frequent speaker on the subject of Information Management and is author of the forthcoming book “Building Enterprise Taxonomies.” He holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh.