IDB Invest. AI- Information, Semantic & Taxonomy Internship, Washington D.C.

IDB Invest. AI-Ready Information, Semantic Knowledge & Taxonomy Internship Job Description IDB Invest. AI-Ready Information, Semantic Knowledge & Taxonomy Internship City:
Washington DC Company: IDB Invest Posting End Date: 9/25/2026 11:59 PM EST

The IDB Group is a community of diverse, versatile, and passionate people who come together on a journey to improve lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our people find purpose and do what they love in an inclusive, collaborative, agile, and rewarding environment.

The IDB Group is looking for an active graduate studentto be hired as an intern under the Consultant modality.

The 2027 Winter Internship Program is a competitive paid opportunity, based in Headquarters, for university students to learn about development work and corporate management of the Bank, and to acquire work experience at the professional level through on-the-job learning.

The Strategy & Knowledge (SPK) team is advancing an initiative aimed at improving the discoverability, reuse, and strategic value of IDB Invest's knowledge assets while establishing foundational capabilities for future AI-enabled knowledge services.

This internship supports the semantic and knowledge-structuring dimension of that program, including taxonomy, controlled vocabulary, and lightweight ontology, working on a bounded knowledge domain as a pilot.

The specific scope will be confirmed in a Week 1 work plan agreed upon with the supervisor, based on where the program stands at the start of the placement. This ensures that the intern's work is well-targeted and valuable, regardless of the exact stage the program has reached.

• Map current metadata, tagging, and categorization practices across relevant knowledge platforms and data sources to establish how content is described today.
• Design and refine a controlled vocabulary and taxonomy, including subject areas, sectors, regions, and document types, aligned with IDB Invest's business lines and knowledge products.
• Draft a lightweight ontology of entities (e.g., publications, projects, countries, sectors, and authors) and their relationships to inform future knowledge graph and AI-powered search applications.
• Pilot-test the taxonomy on a representative sample of content, building a gold-standard reference set and measuring tagging consistency and retrieval accuracy for representative prompts.
• Document the metadata standards, tagging guidelines, taxonomy structure, and ontology model developed during the pilot, and present recommendations for future implementation to the team.

• Education: An active Graduate Student in Library/Information Science, Knowledge Management, Computational Linguistics, Data/Information Architecture, Computer Science, or a related field, from an accredited University. The graduation date should be after the Internship period.
• Languages :
  Fluency in English with a working knowledge of one other Bank language (Spanish, French, or Portuguese) is a plus.
• Soft Skills: Result-driven, collaborative, innovative, client-oriented, strong communicator, self-motivated, eager to learn, and excellent time management. Comfort working with ambiguity and unstructured content.
• Key Skills :
  Learn continuously, collaborate and share knowledge, focus on clients, communicate and influence, innovate and try new things.
• Technical skills: Familiarity with taxonomy design, controlled vocabularies, and ontology or metadata frameworks (e.g., SKOS, Dublin Core, OWL, RDF). Strong analytical and structural thinking. Comfort with qualitative and quantitative content analysis. Working knowledge of Excel and document or knowledge management systems (SharePoint a plus). Interest in AI, information retrieval, and…