The winners of two awards designed to highlight the very best practitioners and organisations working with taxonomies were announced at last week's Taxonomy Boot Camp in London (TBCL). Nominations took place over the summer in two categories: Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year and Taxonomy Success of the Year.
The winner of the Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year award was Tom Alexander, Taxonomy Manager, Cancer Research UK. Presenting the award, Chair of the judges and TBCL Conference Chair Helen Lippell noted that Tom had successfully used techniques from other disciplines to drive adoption of taxonomies, generated impressive metrics on reduced search failure rate and increased video views, and been successful in getting a sense of shared ownership across the organisation.
The finalists in this category were:
- Liane Bradbrook, Advisor, Environment Agency
- Judi Vernau, Director, Metataxis.
The winner of the Taxonomy Success of the Year award was SAGE Research Methods Thesaurus, led by Alan Maloney & Martha Sedgwick, SAGE Publishing.
Helen Lippell noted that the judges had been impressed with the work done in 2018 to increase the application of the thesaurus, the fact that the thesaurus is freely available to the industry, and the innovation of being able to navigate the taxonomy through an Alexa skill. The award was collected by Mano Prabhakaran, Product Manager, SAGE Publishing (pictured).
The finalists in this category were:
- 2DSearch led by Tony Russell-Rose, UXLabs
- Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT), led by Liz Allen, F1000; Alison O'Connell, Collaborative Knowledge Foundation; David Baker, CASRAI
- HBO Multiple Language Standards, led by Yonah Levenson, HBO
Helen Lippell commented, “Taxonomies are proving to be indispensable business assets used in a vast range of applications supporting websites, intranets, search engines, start-ups, knowledge management, scientific research, digital publishing and much more. These are Taxonomy Boot Camp’s inaugural awards and the calibre of entries was extremely high, making it hard to choose from a strong set of nominations in both categories but I am pleased that TBCL has recognised two such worthy winners”.
Taxonomy Boot Camp London takes place again in 2019 on 15 & 16 October www.taxonomybootcamp.com/London