There's been a trend of late to search for the silver lining amongst all the economic gloom and doom, and far be it from us trendy taxonomists not to capitalize on that.  We put our heads together and came up with our predictions of what taxonomy will be up to in 2009, and why, despite what some folks say, it will still be necessary, desirable, and useful.

1. Taxonomy will support re-use and re-purposing of content.  We often have clients who use a shared content repository come to us and say, "We know there must be more good stuff out there, but we don't know how to get our hands on it!"  Ensuring that content is appropriately described and the correct terms are being leveraged for its discovery adds value by preventing unnecessary duplication of content across different units within the enterprise.  Which in turns spares the enterprise the expense of all that duplicative effort.
2. Taxonomy will keep your content clean.  Conversely, other clients who work with a shared repository ask us, "We can't have any content on our site but our own!  How can we make sure that happens?"  Taxonomy can be used to create exclusive content filters as well as inclusive ones, serving up the most targeted information possible.  That means less time spent on hunting for just the right document and more time spent on using it.
3. Taxonomy will support information security.  Whether it's making health care information portable or declassifying government documents, taxonomy supports the automation of processes for helping guarantee the security of sensitive information - as well as protecting purveyors of that information from costly liability.
4. Taxonomy and social media in the enterprise: substance over buzz.  For the past few years, enterprise clients have been asking for Web 2.0 applications just for the sake of having them because they're the latest and greatest.  Now, with more exposure to exactly what these bells and whistles will and won't do in the enterprise space, we're expecting to see more thoughtful inclusion of features like social tagging and metadata visualization (read: tag clouds), with the focus being on how they will enhance productivity.
5. Taxonomy will support search on the cheap.  Consistent description of web documents using a controlled vocabulary improves findability via keyword search, raises page rank, and drives site traffic - all without needing to pay for keywords.  And if search engine marketing is part of your strategy, taxonomy also offers the advantage of augmenting and refining the store of keywords which your marketers use in their campaigns.
6. Taxonomy will integrate with BI and CRM platforms.  It's not just for documents anymore!  Business intelligence and customer relationship management specialists are increasingly seeing the value of taxonomy services for supplying authoritative, externally validated categories to describe and manage customer information, sales and marketing campaigns, and performance metrics, both within the enterprise and across industry sectors.
7. Taxonomy will support behavior targeting.  Taxonomy provides a stable structure to describe, sort, and analyze all those dynamic data points you're gathering from your customers - from demographic information to searching and purchasing habits - and leverage them as part of customized marketing strategies.  
8. Taxonomy consumers will shoulder more of the maintenance.  As shrinking budgets reduce support for dedicated taxonomy maintenance, more enterprise clients are turning to user-driven models of information organization exemplified by social media sites like Delicious and Flickr.  The bad news: more cooks in the kitchen means that standard terminology is harder to enforce enterprise-wide.  The good news: social tagging drives collaboration by allowing employees to tap into information in each others' heads, and wiki technologies (such as those in use on LibraryThing) allow users to reach consensus about the best terms to use.
9. Taxonomy skill sets will expand into other areas.  Few of us who define ourselves professionally as taxonomists are likely to be exclusive practitioners of taxonomy throughout our careers.  Many of us have led double (or triple, or n-dimensional) lives in the past as content managers, database geeks, interaction designers, usability researchers, and search specialists.  In tough economic times, we can expect our roles to diversify our and skill sets to grow, which has the potential to benefit our clients as well as better inform our co-workers.
10. What is this "taxonomy" you speak of?  It figures that taxonomists would have a harder time than most other professionals coming up with a label for the work that we do.  Some of us feel that "taxonomy" has gotten a bad rap for being overly rigid and should be avoided.  Others feel that use of terms like "ontology" are overly obscure as well as potentially misleading.  Neither term captures the sheer range of what we do - everything from the most highly articulated knowledge structures to simply grouping items in a list.  The debate will likely rage on, but whatever we call ourselves, we believe that demand for our knowledge and experience is only likely to grow.