The Synaptica team regularly attend a diverse range of events, talks and seminars including Dublin Core, KMWorld, Washington and Taxonomy Boot Camp, London. The team also attend events organized by SLA, ISKO, NetIKX, CILIP. A selection of our event activity can be found below including recent presentations, digests and talks.
Presentations & Talks
Bite-Sized Taxonomy Boot Camp London 2021
Ontology as the backbone of content discovery
Part of the Bite-Sized TBCL series. This session, co-presented by RPS and Synaptica, discusses the knowledge modelling design process, illustrates some of the practical workflows used by the taxonomy editorial team, and describes how the resulting ontology, SPINE (Substances their Properties, Identifiers and NomenclaturE) integrates with content and search systems. A case study that began with a 24 month journey to design and build an enterprise ontology, incorporating multiple internal and external cross-walked taxonomies, and ends with a healthcare content search and discovery success story.
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) is a world leader in the safe use of medicines. In 2020 RPS designed, developed and deployed an enterprise ontology to standardise the classification and terminology used to identify and describe chemical substances, including drugs, excipients, poisons, herbals, etc., and their therapeutic uses, chemistry and physical properties.
Moderator:
Denis Dechandon, Head of the Metadata Sector, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg
Speakers:
Kiri Aikman, Head of New Content, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, UK
Jonathan Stott, Technical Architect, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, UK
Dave Clarke, CEO, Synaptica LLC, USA
KMWorld Connect 2020
Building a Knowledge-based Enterprise One Step at a Time
Is taxonomy out and ontology in? Are ontologies cooling off and knowledge graphs heating up? To take advantage of advances in information and data science, and to avoid reworking designs to fit the latest hype cycle, it is important to have a coherent strategy for building a knowledge-based enterprise from the foundations up, one step at a time.
Watch the Keynote on YouTube from Dave Clarke, CEO & Founder, Synaptica with Atanas Kiryakov, CEO Ontotext.
Mini-Workshop: Knowledge Graphs as Art and Architecture
Knowledge graphs are not a plug-and-play solution. The implementation of a knowledge graph is equal parts art and architecture involving business and technical teams. An overall knowledge graph strategy should be created, the underlying ontology must be modelled and developed, data and content sources identified, and systems integrated. In this workshop, learn to define the strategic and technical components which need to come together to successfully implement a knowledge graph.
Watch the KMWorld mini-workshop on YouTube from Bob Kasenchak and Ahren Lehnert, Senior Managers at Synaptica.
Strategies for Taxonomy Mapping
When Things Can’t be Standardized: Separate Taxonomies & Mapping
Organizations with multiple vocabularies often wish to map them to one another or to external vocabularies for knowledge management, information retrieval, content strategy, and other uses. This is not as simple as it seems and can represent a great deal of manual effort. What does it mean to map terms? What are the different ways to express, for example, exact and near topical matches?
Watch the talk on YouTube from Bob Kasenchak, Senior Manager, Client Solutions, Synaptica discusses strategies and options for mapping and crosswalking taxonomies including models, techniques, and tools.
A Wiki, an Ontology, & a Knowledge Graph Walk into a Bar
Models for Unstructured Data
Ahren Lehnert, Senior Manager, Synaptica discusses how wikis are a great way to share knowledge and are an active practice in many KM scenarios. Wiki content, being textual, is only semi-structured and requires metadata tagging and analysis to surface useful information. While many wiki platforms include content tagging options, these concepts are typically limited to categorizing content and aiding search. What if wiki content could be supplemented with ontologies and linked data and made part of a larger knowledge graph?
Watch on YouTube about an ontology, a wiki, and linked data who walked into a bar and walked out dreadfully sober and clear.
Beyond Posting Counts: Giving Taxonomists a 360 Degree View of How Concepts are Applied to Content
DCMI Virtual 2020
DCMI Virtual was a program of virtual, invited and moderated sessions including keynotes, expert panel discussions, tutorials and presentations. The conference was interactive, with moderated question and answer sessions and ran from Monday September 14th to Friday 25th September 2020. Dave Clarke shared a case study in which an ontology was used to create content description profiles and bi-directional APIs. The solution provided users with an innovative ability to review qualitative as well as quantitative details about how concepts are used.
Download the presentation
The hype around knowledge graphs
Many of us have experience of building different kinds of knowledge organization systems, and now knowledge graphs are another tool in our taxonomy toolbox. Dave Clarke explored the role of KOS in an accessible and straightforward way. For this keynote as part of TBCL19 he puts KOS in the broader context of knowledge graphs and their component taxonomies, metadata and data.
Download the hype around knowledge graphs
Validating a taxonomy with stakeholders
Bob Kasenchak outlined how the validation phase of a taxonomy project is crucial to mediating a dailogue between the taxonomist and the various stakeholders and consumers of their work.
Download Validating a taxonomy
Extending SharePoint taxonomy
Ahren E. Lehnert and Agnes Molnar, Search Explained presented a case study of a custom-built UI which can add taxonomy management features such as related terms and polyhierarchy to the native SharePoint Term Store.
Download Extending SharePoint taxonomy
