Taxonomy Strategies is an information management consultancy that specializes in applying taxonomies, metadata, automatic classification, and other information retrieval and artificial intelligence technologies to the needs of business, industry groups, the public sector, and civil society. The company is recognized as one of the foremost authorities on standards-based approaches to taxonomy development, particularly in complex, multi-stakeholder, and multi-disciplinary contexts. We do this by using best practices in taxonomy development, an evidence-based approach, and by using knowledge management techniques to establish and maintain common ground among diverse stakeholder groups.
While serving diverse constituencies, Taxonomy Strategies has worked with several important MFIs focused on building and supporting international development infrastructure and promoting monetary stability. In these projects, we worked with various stakeholders to define fundamental categorization schemes and the rules to be used to determine and maintain these categories over time.
For example, at international organizations the names of countries is fundamental to all activities, data collection, analysis, and reporting. All communication protocols rely on accurate names and roles for all individuals who represent their constituencies. At the International Monetary Fund, Taxonomy Strategies worked with the IMF secretariat, business, and IT stakeholders using a workshop process to develop recommendations on how the IMF should manage country-related terminology, and to provide guidance on how to simplify the use of standard terminology in published documents and IT applications.
At the Bank for International Settlements, the core mission is to promote monetary and financial stability through banking supervision in areas such as anti-money laundering. Banking supervision relies on knowledge sharing to support training, investigations, and compliance. Taxonomy Strategies developed the metadata and categorization scheme for a new enterprise content management system to support document management and provide trusted searchable reference collections of reliable authoritative content.
At the multilateral development banks one of the key bottlenecks is the appraisal and approval of projects. This involves a huge amount of documentation of project development activities prior to implementation. This is a major documentation challenge and potential project implementation obstacle. Taxonomy Strategies is working with the African Development Bank to facilitate a digital transformation of the Bank’s documentation facility to address the project implementation challenge and to unify access to documents across all the Bank’s business activities, as well as to enable the disposition of the Bank’s records and their disclosure as appropriate.
Table 1-Taxonomy Strategies international development and banking projects
| Organization | Location | Period of Performance | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| African Development Bank | Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire | 2023-present | Taxonomy Strategies is working with the AfDB to develop a standard file plan and metadata scheme for a new document and records management platform being developed to support development project activities. |
| Bank for International Settlements | Basel, Switzerland | 2010 | Taxonomy Strategies developed and validated a metadata and categorization strategy, a categorization governance strategy, and oversaw the implementation of the categorization scheme and processes within a new enterprise content management system. |
| Inter-American Development Bank | Washington, D.C. | 2009, 2023-2024 | In two separate engagements, Taxonomy Strategies reviewed and assessed current IDB taxonomy practices using quantitative analytics, qualitative best practices, and heuristics; and recommended IDB-appropriate taxonomy governance and management processes. We also developed, validated, and implemented dataset-specific categories. |
| International Finance Corporation World Bank Group | Washington, D.C. | 2009-2010 | Taxonomy Strategies facilitated a usability review of the SmartLessons web site. |
| International Monetary Fund | Washington, D.C. | 2005-2006 | Taxonomy Strategies developed recommendations on how the IMF should manage Country-related Terminology, and provided guidance on how to simplify the use of standard terminology in published documents and IT applications. |
| Save the Children | Washington, D.C. | 2015-2016 | Taxonomy Strategies worked with the Health and Nutrition Global Initiative to develop and operationalize a digital resource library. |
| State Bank of Pakistan | Karachi, Pakistan | 2018-2019 | Taxonomy Strategies developed and supported a taxonomy, metadata, and controlled vocabulary document inventory process. We aggregated the inventories from all departments and recommended a consolidated metadata scheme and controlled vocabularies to support enterprise content management use cases. Finally, we prepared information architecture and information management recommendations, ECM governance best practices and a taxonomy governance process guide. |
Figure 1-Document repository before ECM at the State Bank of Pakistan
