Knowledge Management Thought Leader 47: Wendi Pohs

Originally posted 02-Nov-23

As cofounder of InfoClear Consulting, Wendi Pohs provided systems design, software tools, and technical consulting services to help large companies integrate semantic technologies with their new or legacy systems.

She focused on taxonomy integration, text analytics, intranet and website search relevance tuning, graph database design, and metadata management, providing strategic taxonomy consulting, taxonomy development and maintenance routines, and relevance enhancements for search.

Wendi and I were at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) at the same time, but we did not know one another then. While there, she developed a competitive intelligence retrieval system, successfully used for years by the sales force. Ron Smart was one of her informal mentors at DEC. A KM thought leader in the 1980s, Ron passed away on March 10, 2013.

Experience

• InfoClear Consulting — Chief Technology Officer, 2006–2022
• IBM — Consulting IT Specialist, 2003–2005
• Iris Associates/Lotus Development — Lead Taxonomist, 2000–2003
• American Mathematical Society, 1994–2000
• Digital Equipment Corporation, 1984–1994

Education

University of Michigan — School of Information

• BA
• MILS

Profiles

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Profiles in Knowledge: Digital Equipment Corporation

Books

Practical Knowledge Management: The Lotus Discovery System with Gayle Thiel and Seth Earley

Enterprise Taxonomies: A Business Professional’s Guide to Taxonomies for Content Retrieval with Richard McCarrick

Upgrading to Lotus Notes and Domino 7 with by Tim Speed, Dick McCarrick, Barry Heinz, Tara Hall, and Matthew Henry

Content

• Full Bibliography
• Blog: Semantics in practice

Presentations

• Taxonomies, Lexicons and Organizing Knowledge
• Selecting a Taxonomy Management Tool
• Taxonomies of Knowledge: Building a Corporate Taxonomy
• The Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies 2004 IBM’s Intranet Search and Enterprise Taxonomy

Enterprise Search Summit

• 2009 Migrating to a New Search Engine: A Case Study with Marilyn Chartrand
• 2006

1. Integrating Search and Taxonomy: A Deep Dive — Workshop with Lisa Kamm
2. Boosting Findability with Lisa Kamm

Taxonomy Boot Camp

• 2009

1. From the Lighthouse: Visioneering Taxonomies’ Future
2. Merging or Integrating Multiple Taxonomies

• 2008

1. Yaksonomy: Talking About Taxonomies
2. Ontologies and Folksonomies
3. Executive Round Table:“Visioneering” the Taxonomy Horizon

• 2007 Everything You Wanted to Know About Auto-Classification (But Were Afraid to Ask)
• 2006 Buy, Build, Automate: The Great Debate
• 2005

1. Building a Taxonomy: The Process
2. Enabling Your Taxonomy: Integration & Implementation

KMWorld

• 2008 W7: Auto-Categorization
• 2008 W16: Measuring Taxonomy Success
• 2006 Integrating Taxonomy & Search: Practices & Trends
• 2005 Workshop 4: Taxonomy Development & Usage
• 2003 Developing Taxonomies for Content Organization
• 2002 Taxonomies, Lexicons, and Organizing Knowledge

Knowledge Nets 2001

• Landing the Raven — Positioning the Lotus KM Implementation in the Enterprise
• Taxonomies of Knowledge: Uncovering Hidden Themes in Existing Corporate Data

Articles

1. Leverage taxonomies for enterprise search using IBM OmniFind, IBM Classification Module, and SchemaLogic with Jochen Dörre, Josemina Magdalen, and Bob St. Clair
2. Creating a rules-based classifier for Discovery Server 2.0
3. Taxonomy and Classification resources should sit on development teams
4. Why I love Twitter
5. Creating and Maintaining Machine-Generated Taxonomies in Human Organizations: Contributions from Research and Practice with Dick McCarrick and Michael Muller
6. Issues in the design of software systems to support voluntary electronic communities with Michael Muller
7. The Lotus Knowledge Discovery System: Tools and experiences
8. Building a taxonomy for auto‐classification
9. Importing a file system taxonomy into a K-map
10. Selecting and configuring Discovery Server data repositories

Developing Taxonomies for Content Organization