At last week's conferences we had the wonderful opportunity to show the attendees how one of our customers utilizes Synaptica our Taxonomy and Metadata Management software.

Paula McCoy, Taxonomy Manager at ProQuest joined me on stage for two sessions during Enteprise Search Summit and Taxonomy Bootcamp. ProQuest provides global access to one of the largest online content repositories in the world and Paula is responsible for maintaining their controlled vocabularies that both editor's and end users use.

The case study addresses the challenges ProQuest faced in managing multilingual controlled vocabularies using multiple Word documents and authority files maintained in an Oracle database. During her presentations, Paula describes how implementing a thesaurus management tool helped ProQuest simplify and standardize its business semantic management to create a common language and connect disparate information assets as well as handling large and varied vocabularies and authority files, linking new and existing editorial systems and enabling hierarchical views, and automating thesaurus management tasks.

Note: Unfortunately the video does not focus on the slides during the taping like some of my other videos i posted from the conference so i have embedded the slides for you to follow along (maybe open a second window and click through).

The first session is 30 minutes and i go through what is and why customers use Centralized Taxonomy Management tools in the first 15 minutes and then Paula presents how she uses Synaptica daily to maintain the ProQuest taxonomies.

Centralized Taxonomy Management for Enterprise Information Systems

The second is a 45minute full Case Study (you only hear me introduce Paula and make some comments about how we need to make Taxonomy exciting!)

Finding a Common Language: Bringing Complex and Disparate Vocabularies Together

Thanks again to Paul McCoy who did an awesome Job!! Thanks!