My name is Ian Davis, and I'm a Global Project Delivery Manager working in the Client Solutions Taxonomy Delivery Team and based in our London office. I work to develop and deliver a range of content and information solutions for our global clients. Projects can include discovery assessments, taxonomy strategy and creation, taxonomy mapping, search support, information architecture and website development. I also assist in the marketing and deployment of Synaptica, a semantic management tool offered by Dow Jones, and the website www.taxonomywarehouse.com.

My particular areas of interest include: developing taxonomies, thesauri, and metadata schemas, manual and automated indexing of still and moving images, deploying and using Synaptica controlled vocabulary software, the challenges of managing teams of geographically dispersed information workers, website creation and development, and the localisation of content into multi-lingual environments"

I joined Dow Jones in February, 2006, after 13 years developing taxonomy and indexing solutions for still images libraries at both Corbis Corporation and Photonica (formerly part of Amana Japan and now part of Getty Images). At Corbis, I served as head of the UK division’s image cataloguing department. At Photonica, I worked to create and implement the e-commerce website www.iconica.com and was responsible for the development of www.photonica.com. I also developed, implemented and maintained all vocabularies underpinning the classification and retrieval of Photonica's extensive digital image content. One aspect of this included creating an extensive English language thesaurus and managing the localisation of that controlled vocabulary into five European languages. I managed a team of ten still image indexers and five thesaurus developers. After leaving Photonica, I worked as an independent consultant for BUPA in the area of metadata and taxonomy creation and development, and the implementation of an enterprise search solution.

Most of my time is currently spent working on the delivery of a major client engagement in Asia. I'm managing a team of geographically dispersed staff who are working on the customisation of a large topical thesaurus and the creation of various browsable taxonomies. We're also creating a multi-lingual thesaurus by translating the large English thesaurus into three other languages and tying the whole lot together. If that wasn't enough, we're also involved in the mapping of the vocabularies we're working on to both legacy internal client vocabularies and to third party ones. We're also starting to consider how to move these thesauri and taxonomies into the world of ontologies."