I'm a web taxonomist with an academic background in both information science and qualitative social science research. I've worked in both enterprise and consulting arenas, in the service of both large corporations and small nonprofits. I'm dedicated to making information more meaningful to the agents which index it, and am equally committed to involving consumers of that information in the process of making it more readily findable and usable.
At Ascentium, I managed a tagging taxonomy for a repository of sales and marketing materials on a consultancy basis for a large software manufacturer. I was engaged by taxonomy consumers on a daily basis with requests to make the vocabulary more useful for purposes of describing their content and enabling it to be surfaced via intranet portals. I helped Ascentium partner with other firms to sell taxonomy services, and was a principal contributor to Ascentium's user experience weblog.
At Exchange Place, an online advertising lead generation service, I maintained the controlled vocabulary which matched consumers’ search strings with relevant advertisers and their products. I developed site navigation as well as the directory for a sibling site, the forum search portal Twing. Additionally, I coordinated efforts to use the knowledge management utility for search engine optimization.
My
first consulting position was to the International
Resource Network,
a Ford
Foundation-funded digital initiative of the Center
for Lesbian and Gay Studies. The IRN is intended to be a
library as
well as social networking site for academics around the globe, allowing
users
to embed metadata a
multilingual thesaurus of subject
descriptors in web
content which they upload themselves. In
developing the thesaurus, I researched relevant
current and historical subject lists as well as vocabulary management
software, and developed a site-specific metadata set.
I'm an avid hiker and cook, an aspiring rock music buff, and a widely published writer of scholarly articles, reviews, and essays.
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