Content Strategy Interviews

Fran Alexander There is always more taxonomy work to be done than there are practitioners to do it. Fran Alexander's solution to this imbalance is to democratize taxonomy practice. Fran's work actually spans the full range of semantic practices, from simple term lists to taxonomies, thesauruses, and ontologies and knowledge graphs. Wherever she's working in this span of activities, she's always happy to bring other practitioners along with her. We talked about: the transition in the taxonomy world from building taxonomies to help machines understand humans to building taxonomies to help humans understand machines he the rise of AI and LLMs has highlighted the importance of well-structured knowledge and good semantic layers the hierarchical progression of knowledge organization from simple lists to full-blown ontologies how her efforts to democratize taxonomy and semantic practice are jump-started by humans' innate organizing schemes how the fact that there is always more semantic work to be done