“And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” – The Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually say something like “information management” because it’s an easy way to simplify the explanation of my work. If people dig deeper, they may ask me, first, what is a taxonomist? Then, what does a taxonomist do? And, if we get through those questions, the next is usually, how did you become a taxonomist?

How does one become a taxonomist? Let me share with you my path to becoming a taxonomist through a combination of chronology, and, of course, categories. I’ll also sprinkle in what I think is also a more common path to getting a role as a taxonomist currently.

Background

If you asked me what I wanted to be when I was young, I probably would have said I wanted to be a writer. Even in high school, I knew that one did not simply become a writer. There was starving and sacrifice to be done, and I am cursed with a little too much pragmatism to go through all that.

My first decision which led to a life of taxonomy was determining the best way to become a writer was to embrace what I loved and teach it. As we all know, teachers have plenty of leisure time and summers off to write their to-be-famous tomes. Well, it turns out that’s not what happens when you are a teacher, which I quickly learned when I was a teacher myself. I went to Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan and got a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language. I also became certified to teach in the Secondary Education program, adding an entire year to my undergraduate studies. I minored in history. The dual program allowed me to take courses in literature, composition, linguistics, and in my history minor. All of those courses turned out to be important later.

After teaching for a few years at the high school level after graduation, I was driven to get my Masters after a rather unsuccessful year as a middle school teacher. I graduated with a Masters degree in English Literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a school known for…well, not English literature. The content of my degree soon became irrelevant, as the important takeaway was having a masters with even more literature and linguistics classes as well as a good dose of literary theory.

With my Masters, it was difficult for me to find full-time employment as a teacher in the New York area. The available positions for an English teacher were limited, the best school districts weren’t often hiring, and the worst only reminded me of what I hadn’t done well as a middle school teacher. After a few years of cobbling together several adjunct teaching positions at several different community colleges, I decided living on the economic edge just wasn’t for me anymore. I wanted some stability, and I was already seeing teaching wasn’t going to remain my passion for many more years.

My decision to leave teaching was as much about the pragmatic ability to have a full-time job with benefits as it was a recognition I would not be fulfilled with a career in education. While seeking a new career path, I applied for a job whose description I didn’t even understand at the Modern Language Association International Bibliography. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned in the interview that I didn’t understand what an Associate Thesaurus Editor did, but I somehow got the job anyway. Later, I was told I was hired because of my diverse background in language, literature, history, and education. Since the MLA indexed articles in all of those humanities areas, having knowledge and experience in them was helpful for reviewing content. In addition, I don’t believe they hired anyone without a Masters degree, so having an MA probably led directly to getting that role.

Everything I ever needed to learn about controlled vocabularies I learned at the MLA. It provided me with a firm foundation in the world of controlled vocabularies and indexing. The more I learned there, the more I realized the timing couldn’t have been better.

Timing (Luck)

I got my job at the MLA in 2002. In 2005, Gartner released its annual Hype Cycle with Taxonomy sitting at the Peak of Inflated Expectations on the curve. Businesses were clamoring for taxonomies. They didn’t really understand what they were or what they did, but they knew they had to have one.

Not only was I learning what it takes to maintain and govern a thesaurus of more than 56,000 terms in a flat list managed in an Access database, I was also making coincidental connections with people in market research and special libraries. The more I understood what they did, the more I began to understand the role of information in the corporate world. The corporate world, mind you, I knew nothing about with my two academic degrees and non-profit academic job. The intersection of my understanding of controlled vocabularies, learning more about market research content, and researching what taxonomists and special librarians did led me to understand that to grow in my career, I would have to make the jump into the business environment.

Strategy (Timing)

I often tell people I couldn’t have planned my career better if I had planned it. The fact is, I didn’t know I would be a good taxonomist until I became one. Sure, I had always been very organized (perhaps borderline OCD), lining up my Matchbox toy cars alternately by color or size as a child. I had also been interested in many different topics, but I never knew there was such a job as working with language that wasn’t linguistics, writing, or teaching some combination of those fields.

I often put more emphasis on my background and timing than on my ability to think strategically, but I did in fact have ideas and insights that proved to be true over time. So, in hindsight, I made some very strategic decisions that just so happened to work out.

The first was contacting people in the world of controlled vocabularies to understand better what they did, how they got there, and what I could do to advance my career in the field. I spoke to two people from the Getty Research Institute about their work on the Getty Vocabularies and how people got into those roles. I also spoke to a well-known taxonomy consultant who, when I told him what I was doing and asked what I should do next, replied, “Be a consultant.”

Back to timing. Since organizations knew they needed taxonomies but not what for or how to build them, they often hired consultancies to show them the way. Before there were taxonomy jobs at many of these companies, there were consultants telling them they needed to create a taxonomy job and hire a taxonomist. I started a two-pronged search for taxonomist or librarian roles and taxonomy consulting jobs. Traditionally, most taxonomists have a Masters in Library and Information Science. It is in this course of study they learn about taxonomies and then choose a path of becoming a librarian, becoming a taxonomist, or becoming a librarian who later becomes a taxonomist. Without an MLIS and no business background, I wasn’t having luck inserting myself into librarian jobs, especially corporate librarian roles.

Consulting companies, however, are always looking for fresh graduates to hire on as junior consultants. Despite being almost ten years out of my undergraduate degree, I did have enough on my resume to work in taxonomies, a niche and uncommon skill set for anyone looking for jobs in the corporate world. I landed a job at BearingPoint, a now defunct consulting company with a great reputation and a strong team in content and information analysis, organization, and discovery. Despite coming in at a junior level, the overall compensation package seemed incredible after years in education and non-profit. I was probably severely lowballed, but it was more than I had been making and gave me several years of additional background in content and records management, search, business analysis, process mapping, user experience design, and a host of other tasks thrown at junior consultants with an explanation something along the lines of, “Here, go become an expert in this.” And, of course, there was the taxonomy for business work that I had been seeking.

So, at the intersection of timing and strategy, I launched a career. I went on to work at several more consulting roles–some for others and one for myself during the economic downturn in 2008–in-house taxonomy roles, and once for a taxonomy and ontology management software vendor. The perfect trifecta: consultant, in-house practitioner, and vendor. With every passing year after breaking into the industry with my first thesaurus job, I learned more and was able to apply those learnings, with varying degrees of success, at the next job.

Takeaways

I believe we are at a moment as pivotal for taxonomy work, if not moreso, than the peak of taxonomy expectations back in 2005. In a field in which the Semantic Web has mostly failed to deliver, artificial intelligence and machine learning models have filled some of the gaps in automating and connecting existing content. What is widely accepted is that these technologies need clean data and taxonomies and ontologies provide foundational structures for classifying and connecting content. They are the semantic underpinnings that should have been the publically accessible and connected Semantic Web. I believe, now more than ever, experts in taxonomies and ontologies are necessary and valuable roles in an organization.

I’ve already laid out a path to becoming a taxonomist that didn’t require an MLIS, getting on-the-job training at an important moment in taxonomy evolution as a required business need. Aside from my initial Masters, which I got in order to get full-time teaching jobs at the college level, I never had to return to school to get the additional skills I needed to become a taxonomist. I learned in my work roles and researched information on my own, with a few certificate courses along the way to round out my education.

Will this still work today? Possibly, but getting your first taxonomy job without an MLIS is probably more difficult now than in the past. I do believe, though, the skills remain about the same as they were over 20 years ago. Therefore, you may find that you have the right skills and knowledge through a combination of your degree and work experience, as I did.

Things you need to know and skills you need to have:

1. How to do research…in any field. The ability to research is inherent to the core tasks of defining preferred labels and discovering concept definitions.
2. The ability to interact with others and negotiate. Taxonomy work is only enabled through work with other business and technical colleagues. It is often necessary to convince people of the value of taxonomies and there are often compromises to be made.
3. Taxonomy and ontology best practices following standards and guidelines like the ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 (R2010) Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies, ISO 25964-1:201, W3C SKOS, W3C RDF, W3C OWL, and any industry-specific standards and available taxonomies and ontologies applicable to your area.
4. Taxonomy and ontology management software vendors and their capabilities, like Access Innovations (Data Harmony), Graphifi (Graphologi), Progress (Semaphore), Stanford’s Protégé, Synaptica (Graphite), TopQuadrant (TopBraid EDG), and others which may be tangential to the functionalities of dedicated software platforms. Understanding how these systems work, even basically, informs how taxonomies are built and delivered to the business.

Things you may need to know and skills you may need to have:

1. A background in library science (an MLIS degree), English (or other literature), or linguistics.
2. Project work in text analytics, search, content, digital asset, and/or records management, user experience, or other fields or applications in which taxonomy features.
3. Decent spreadsheet skills. I’ve never met a taxonomist who didn’t start their taxonomies in spreadsheets.
4. Knowledge of triplestore graph databases on the market, including AllegroGraph, Amazon Neptune, OntoText GraphDB, Stardog, Neo4j, and others.
5. Awareness of and interaction with taxonomy practitioners and consultancies, including Dovecot Studio, Enterprise Knowledge, Semantic Arts, Straits Knowledge, Taxonomy Strategies, taxonomy and ontology management software vendors, and others.

Things you really don’t need to know or have the skills to do yourself:

1. Speak more than one language. If working in the United States, the primary language of an organization is probably English. If you are doing multilingual taxonomy work, it may help to speak one or more languages, but many organizations use translation services. Of course, an understanding of other languages helps because taxonomy is all about words.
2. Programming and formatting languages, including XML, JSON, SPARQL, and SHACL. You may need to write these yourself, but there are frequently vendor or in-house resources to do this if you’ve already gone far enough to need them.
3. How machine learning models work. There are people who do this as their core competency. A taxonomist isn’t expected to know how these models work under the covers, but it does help to have an understanding of how models will use taxonomies.

This is not an exhaustive list and these are my opinions after working in taxonomy for over 20 years. People, companies, or products not mentioned here is likely an oversight and does not indicate a negative opinion or lack of endorsement. I also didn’t provide a list of excellent taxonomy resources, including websites and books, because there are so many and they are already pretty well documented. A few quick searches should set you on the right path to find your own resources.

Having frequently been asked how I became a taxonomist and what I had to do, know, or learn to become one, I hope this blog helps others on their path!