LIASA IGBIS Community of Practice is delighted to welcome Wynand van der Walt as the guest speaker for our upcoming webinar, scheduled for Tuesday, 29 July. We invite you to join us and be part of this engaging session.

As calls to decolonise library collections grow louder, attention has turned to the very structures that shape how knowledge is organised. Taxonomically Speaking examines how traditional classification systems and ontologies often reinforce colonial worldviews, marginalising Indigenous knowledge, non-Western perspectives, and culturally diverse narratives.

The presentation will explore current efforts to rethink and rebuild taxonomies and ontological frameworks to reflect a more inclusive and pluralistic understanding of knowledge. It highlights innovative initiatives that challenge dominant models and support the creation of alternative, culturally grounded systems.

Participants will gain insight into how libraries can adopt more equitable cataloguing practices and how linked data technologies are being used to decolonise digital spaces—ensuring that historically excluded voices and experiences are made visible in institutional and online knowledge repositories.

Wynand van der Walt is the Senior Manager: Innovation, Systems and Collections at Rhodes University Library. Wynand holds a Masters in IT from the University of Pretoria. His areas of interest are leadership for innovation, digitisation and digital curation, scholarly communication, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and ontological frameworks within the semantic web and how it affects information-related technologies.