Making the World’s Modern Slavery Evidence Findable: Taxonomy Design for a Global UN Knowledge Platform.

About the Client

UNU is the United Nations’ global think tank and postgraduate teaching arm, operating through a worldwide network of research institutes addressing pressing global challenges. This engagement supported what would become a flagship initiative of UNU’s Centre for Policy Research: an online knowledge platform built as a contribution to Alliance 8.7, the global partnership of organizations working to eradicate modern slavery, forced labor, human trafficking, and child labor.

Industry Context

SDG Target 8.7 is one of the most ambitious commitments in the UN’s development agenda: 193 member states pledged to take effective measures to end modern slavery and human trafficking by 2030, and child labor by 2025 — a goal that experts have estimated requires freeing thousands of people from exploitation every single day. Delivering credible, evidence-based policy at that scale depends on getting scattered global research into a form policymakers can actually use, which is precisely the findability problem a well-designed taxonomy solves. Interoperability with the wider humanitarian data ecosystem mattered too. The sector has long relied on shared data standards such as the Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) to let information move cleanly between the many organizations and repositories working on related crises, and the platform’s taxonomy needed to work within that broader ecosystem rather than as an island.

Current Situation

The Knowledge Platform’s design criteria centered on serving policy-level actors with data visualization and summarized research findings, while also fostering a stronger knowledge base and better collaboration among researchers. Priority was placed on robust search functionality, mobile device access, easy content sharing, and reliable performance in areas with unreliable connectivity. Quoin Inc. served as the project’s main contractor, and Iknow was brought on as a subcontractor specifically to design and implement the platform’s taxonomy.

• An extremely broad, fast-moving subject area. Modern slavery risk and vulnerability factors and intervention effectiveness span policy, geography, industry sector, and organizational data sources simultaneously, with no existing unified structure to organize the evidence.
• A global, resource-constrained audience. The platform had to serve policymakers and researchers worldwide on both desktop and mobile, including in regions with unreliable internet connectivity.
• A need for long-term content governance, not just launch-day organization. As the platform’s content — blog posts, datasets, articles — accumulated over time, UNU needed the ability to review material by topic to keep the most important content visible and archive what became outdated.
• Interoperability with the broader humanitarian data ecosystem. The taxonomy needed to interface with other sites and data repositories used across the humanitarian sector, requiring alignment with recognized external standards rather than a purely bespoke vocabulary.
• A compressed delivery timeline. The taxonomy had to be fully defined, developed, and implemented within roughly 10 weeks as a subcontracted piece of a larger platform build already underway.

• Define clear objectives and search use cases for the new taxonomy, including thematic area pages, faceted search refinement, cross-linking between related content, and interoperability with external data repositories.
• Develop a taxonomy grounded in real usage — how users would search and browse, how UNU organized content internally, and how partner organizations categorized similar material.
• Keep the taxonomy as simple and concise as possible while still enabling effective refinement, browsing, and information exchange.
• Implement the approved taxonomy as a structured, machine-readable artifact ready for the technology platform.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement around three phases — Define the Objectives, Develop the Taxonomy, and Implement the Taxonomy — moving from a clear statement of what the taxonomy needed to support, to a collaboratively developed term set, to a technology-ready deliverable.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Define the Objectives. Iknow clearly defined the taxonomy’s required capabilities: thematic area pages, search refiners for faceted browsing, links to related content from each page, and interfacing with other humanitarian sites and data repositories using standard term sets such as HXL. Iknow also planned ahead for longer-term content governance, ensuring UNU could review accumulated content by topic as the platform grew and archive material that became outdated.
• Develop the Taxonomy. Iknow anchored term development in three concrete usage questions: how UNU expected users to search and browse the content and what concepts they would search for; how UNU organized content internally; and how related organizations categorized content in the same topic areas, particularly where data or document sharing was likely. Iknow held a series of working meetings with UNU project leaders to answer these questions and jointly develop a taxonomy that stayed as simple and concise as possible while still supporting effective refinement, browsing, and information exchange. The result was a five-facet taxonomy with up to three levels of hierarchy per facet: policy areas (e.g., migration and displacement), types of exploitation (e.g., modern slavery), regions and countries active in the UN’s 8.7 initiative, organizations (UN and partner agencies doing operational fieldwork or contributing data), and industry sectors where exploitation is most severe (e.g., mining).
• Implement the Taxonomy. Once UNU approved the draft taxonomy, Iknow translated the full term set into a structured XML file for direct use in the technology platform.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked as subcontractor to prime contractor Quoin Inc., which led the overall Knowledge Platform build, and collaborated directly with UNU’s project leaders to develop and validate the taxonomy throughout the engagement.

Balancing Simplicity Against the Breadth of the Subject Matter

Modern slavery evidence spans policy, exploitation type, geography, contributing organizations, and industry sector all at once, creating real risk of either an overly complex taxonomy or one too shallow to support genuine research use. Iknow addressed this by anchoring development in concrete usage questions — how users would actually search and browse, how UNU already organized its content, and how peer organizations categorized similar material — rather than a top-down academic classification exercise, converging on a five-facet, three-level structure that stayed simple while still supporting effective faceted browsing.

Designing for Interoperability From the Start

A taxonomy built in isolation risked becoming just one more incompatible vocabulary in an already fragmented humanitarian data landscape. Iknow addressed this by building interfacing with other sites and data repositories into the taxonomy’s objectives from day one and aligning relevant elements with recognized standards such as HXL, rather than treating external interoperability as an afterthought once the core structure was already locked in.

Operational Outcomes

• Delivered a five-facet taxonomy with up to three levels of hierarchy per facet within a roughly 10-week subcontracted engagement (January–March 2018).
• Translated the approved taxonomy into a structured XML file for direct implementation in the Knowledge Platform’s technology stack.
• Designed the taxonomy’s five branches — policy areas, types of exploitation, regions/countries, organizations, and industry sectors — to support both immediate faceted search and long-term content lifecycle management as the platform’s library grew.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

Both UNU and Quoin thought highly of Iknow’s work, and full implementation of the Knowledge Platform moved forward immediately following the engagement. That platform later launched publicly as Delta 8.7 — the Alliance 8.7 Knowledge Platform — at the UN General Assembly in September 2018. It went on to grow into a substantial global resource, eventually hosting data dashboards for every UN member state and hundreds of articles from experts around the world, a scale of content the original taxonomy was specifically designed to organize and sustain.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow completed all three taxonomy development phases within the engagement period. Roughly six months later, the platform launched publicly on the world stage at the UN General Assembly, giving the taxonomy real-world validation at global scale within the same year it was designed.

Core Skills

• Taxonomy Design & Development
• Information Architecture & Content Findability
• Content Governance & Lifecycle Planning
• Subcontractor / Partner-Team Collaboration

Methods & Frameworks

• Usage-driven taxonomy development methodology
• Faceted classification design
• Structured XML taxonomy implementation
• Standards-based interoperability design (e.g., HXL)

Technologies & Tools

• XML-based taxonomy structures
• Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) term set alignment