On Wednesday, July 23, 2014, from 12 noon - pm ET, the Global Health Knowledge Collaborative sponsored a webinar that explored the structure and usage of taxonomies: Taxonomy 101.

James BonTempo, Director of ICT & Innovation for JHU·CCP, discussed the WHO mHealth Technical & Evidence Review Group (mTERG) and its development of the mHealth Evidence Taxonomy. The taxonomy is currently being used on mHealth Evidence (www.mhealthevidence.org) and also to facilitate the mTERG’s analysis and synthesis of the mHealth evidence base. In particular, Mr. BonTempo will focus on the process of developing the taxonomy which involved a global Task Force representing several disciplines and required researching and attempting to harmonize several existing taxonomies.

Mr. BonTempo has over 15 years of experience in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in both the nonprofit and commercial sectors. During that time, he has provided technical leadership to international organizations as well as global and country-level projects in 13 countries across Africa and Asia in areas including education and training, knowledge management, behavior change communication, health service delivery, and monitoring and evaluation.

Sarah Burns, Knowledge Management Advisor at Pathfinder International, addressed the development, implementation, and maintenance of Pathfinder’s internal technical taxonomy. The taxonomy was developed with a focus on tagging content within Pathfinder’s SharePoint environment, but it is also used to classify content across various systems, including Pathfinder’s website, monitoring and evaluation system, and financial management system.

Ms. Burns has six years of information and knowledge management experience in a variety of not-for-profit settings. At Pathfinder, she is responsible for a wide array of knowledge management related activities with a focus on fostering the use of communities of practice, creating a technical knowledge repository (“The Hub”), and ensuring access to these resources through the SharePoint-based intranet.

Link to webinar recording: https://connect.johnshopkins.edu/p4jet8rd4gd/