Heather Hedden, author and taxonomist, is taking a look at the products available and the trends that are evident within the taxonomy field. Some things haven’t changed for a while, like the increase in cloud/web-based software, more SKOS/RDF/Semantic web framework software, and more plugins to SharePoint, content management systems, and search engines. This interesting information came to us from The Accidental Taxonomist blog in the post titled, “Taxonomy Software Trends.”

The number of commercial vendors selling taxonomy/thesaurus management software has not significantly changed, either. However those offering subscription, web-based software are not all the same. Data Harmony Thesaurus Master from Access Innovations was originally only available in a client-server installation. For the past several year,s a web version has also been available, and Access Innovations president Marjorie Hlava said in an email: “Increasingly, our customers use the cloud version of the software.”

Newer thesaurus management software products to the market have been solely cloud-based. These include PoolParty, introduced by the Semantic Web Company in 2009, and TopBraid Enterprise Vocabulary Net (EVN), released by TopQuadrant in 2010.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.