Career Opportunities for Taxonomists

As we strive to be as helpful as possible to those in the fields of taxonomy, indexing, ontology, etc., we are excited to share career opportunities that we find with our readers. Even if you aren’t in the market for a career move, it is always good to stay on top of what is available and how the fields are evolving.

Office Depot is looking for a Senior Taxonomist in their Boca Raton, Florida location. You can click here to learn more about the position.

An ESB Information Architecture Expert is needed in Baltimore, Maryland at AQUAS, a company of fewer than 100 employees. You can click here to learn more about the position.

If you are looking to change positions, good luck on your search.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.

Splunk and Domino’s Pizza Team Up

Splunk is now providing Domino’s Pizza with their software platform for real-time operational intelligence, SplunkEnterprise, to enhance their online business. This interesting information was found on Hispanic Business in their article, “Domino’s Pizza Transforms E-Commerce With Splunk.”

“In business and marketing, we have just begun scratching the surface of how we can use Splunk Enterprise to make better decisions. Comparing coupons, for example, already has vastly improved the effectiveness of those campaigns,” said Russell Turner, manager of site reliability engineering, Domino’s. “Splunk software cut our mean time to resolution from hours or days to minutes and seconds, which frees up our IT and engineering teams to spend more time dreaming up new ways to use Splunk. In fact, if we unleashed all the business insights we now have access to with Splunk, we would be inundated with company requests for information. It really is our secret sauce.”

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

We have found the perfect job for someone who is in the information technology field and who loves baseball. Though that isn’t always a combination you think of together, the Cleveland Indians are seeking a Data Architect for Baseball Systems. This person will design, implement, and manage the Baseball Department’s information architecture.

This interesting and slightly different news information was found on Baseball Daily Digest in their article, “Indians Looking for Data Architect – Baseball Systems.” The Data Architect will partner with the Baseball Analytics and Software Development groups to maintain data infrastructure, support needs, implement solutions, and drive innovation in baseball’s data-driven decision process. You can learn more about the position and apply here.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.

Event Makes it Easy to Spend that Budget

ZL Technologies was one of the featured businesses at the 930Gov Showcase in Washington, DC this week. 930Gov Showcase is organized by the Digital Government Institute (DGI) to enable federal attendees to engage directly with leading-edge vendors of eDiscovery, cloud, records management, and other information governance solutions before the end of the fiscal year in September, a.k.a. budget time.

IT Business Net brought this interesting information to our attention in their article, “ZL Technologies to be Featured at 930Gov Federal Year-End Technology Showcase.” The showcase focuses on strategic implementation. At this time when government practitioners are looking to utilize their remaining budget on technology, it is an opportune time for the exposure.

Big data continues to challenge most organizations, so they are constantly looking for solutions. This event is geared towards showcasing possible solutions.

Melody K. Smith

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

Analytics Are Popular

TEMIS has acquired U.S.-based advanced analytics and visualization technology firm i3 Analytics. The latter provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) ‘Biopharma Navigator’ platform that charts the biopharma landscape based on open life sciences data. We found this article on Mr. Web in their article, “TEMIS Buys i3 Analytics.”

TEMIS will integrate i3’s platform into its flagship Luxid product, which is used to semantically enrich content with domain-specific metadata. According to Eric Brégand, CEO of TEMIS, ‘This transaction creates a best-in-class offering for our life sciences customers, based on the winning combination of deep computational linguistics expertise and leading-edge data visualization know-how. And we will be transposing the solution to other verticals where data analytics and information visualization are also becoming critical.”

This is the second acquisition that we have mentioned lately that is focused on analytics. In this social, instantaneous, and competitive world, any edge is appreciated.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.

 

Marjorie M.K. Hlava’s Name Entered Into Congressional Record

The name of Marjorie M.K. Hlava, President and Chairman of Access Innovations, Inc., has been entered into the Congressional Record by New Mexico Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Hlava was recognized by Albuquerque Business First as a 2013 Woman of Influence in January. Lujan Grisham entered the names of the 2013 Women of Influence honorees on May 23, saying, “It is important to highlight women in our communities who are achieving incredible successes as local business and community leaders. . . . I understand the challenges of being a small business owner and overcoming hurdles that are all-too-common for women in a male-dominated culture. I appreciate and applaud this year’s honorees, each of whom has contributed to the state of New Mexico in unique and exciting ways.”

By reading the statement on the floor of Congress, Lujan Grisham ensured that the names of Hlava and the 31 other honorees will be archived by the U.S. Government Printing Office.

To read Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham’s full announcement, visit the Congressional archives page.

My Mom Taught Me To Share

There seems to be a lot of buzz about Pinterest and their potential copyright debacle. The image-based social network is taking a small step toward relieving some website owners who are concerned with potential copyright violations.

This interesting information was found on Marketing Land in their article, “Pinterest Takes A Small Step Toward Fighting Copyright With Opt-Out Meta Tag.” Pinterest is supporting a “nopin” meta tag that will prevent users from pinning images directly from the site where the code is installed.

Now let me talk as an avid Pinterest user. I can’t understand why people wouldn’t want someone to share what they found. I have purchased many items from sites I found on Pinterest, and the recipes I have made from food websites and blogs are too numerous to count. Maybe I don’t understand the risk completely, but I certainly would be less inclined to visit a website twice that wouldn’t let me share what I found. Just sayin’.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.

2012: What Lies Ahead?

This time of year I read a lot of trends and reviews. What happened last year and what will happen in the coming year is a popular topic and it is in fact a good time to take stock and think about initiatives for the year ahead. So here is what I see coming down the road for 2012.

1. More people will be building and implementing taxonomies. The awareness of controlled vocabularies and their applications continues to grow. They will be applied not just in publishing but in websites, association offerings, commerce online and in records management and retention. There are many ways to leverage a taxonomy and information architects have only brushed the surface in their applications. Medical organizations will also embrace alternatives to IDC-9 and the complexity of government driven coding to find accuracy through taxonomic means.

2. Taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, interoperability and linked data will become mainstream for corporations. Publishers and associations will also actively embrace the needs for control over ever growing collections. Universities and government will be late adopters.

3. With the increase in taxonomists there is also an explosion of “carpet baggers” these people see a hot trend and are leaping on the wagon with newly heralded expertise. It is true that vocabulary control has been around for well over 100 years, so many will have a back ground in the area, just a new field to apply their skill sets. It is also an area that is learned in practice, but not difficult to learn. The standards outline the options and there are many webinars, reading and other training opportunities in the field. This means the buyer beware in checking the credentials of their service and software providers. Is there hands on experience or book learning or opportunity seekers?

4. I don’t think the semantic web will happen this year either. In fact I don’t think it will ever happen as originally envisioned. It is just too complicated and no search system to support it has gotten out of the lab to handle large data sets. Just as SGML gave way to HTML and then XML, Semantic web will fade and Linked Data will rise.

5. I do think that the linked data initiatives will take the lead. I expect the Linked Data community will get over its focus on the syntax and start talking about implementation and application leading the way by showing how it can be done, in many ways and there is no single path needed to make those links. Mash ups using linked data will become much more common. Some of these are already very active sites and many more will follow in 2012.

6. The rebirth of Dublin Core. Oh I know it has been around for a long time – I have a few lashes to show for it myself. But when that standard (Z39.84) was “passed” it was by inventing a new way to get around the standards consensus requirement and used a new program called “fast tracking”. now 15 years later the reasons it got 7 NO votes are still there but they are finally getting an honest appraisal and serious consideration on what the functional requirements need to be and how to make Dublin Core work as a real measurable standard rather than a guideline. The new crop of DC advocates will make it happen. In addition the linked Data crowd and the DC crowd are working together to bring real change and education to the marketplace as well as to University enclaves.

7. The ontology name is so cool. Not many are really sure what it means and very few mean the OWL standard when they use it. Having said that I think we will all be talking more about ontologies and less about taxonomies (and certainly not thesauri) this year. We might still mean the same thing but our words to describe it will change.

8. Finally I think everyone will be more cut throat. Manners and honesty will take a back seat to getting the sale and the close. We saw that increase last year and I think it will continue to grow as a problem in 2012. There are two underlying reasons. The shrinking marketplace tied to the larger number of investment capital firms behind many businesses will cause them to cut corners to get the sale so they can make their “numbers”. The other reason is the increasingly uncivil political climate will bleed its desperation into all other corners of our lives.

Marjorie M.K. Hlava
President, Access Innovations

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

I know I can’t be alone in the amount of spam email I get daily. In fact, I probably receive a lower amount than most. It is amazing that I actually find my real mail, mail I actually want to read, in the middle of all the junk. Then there are the spams that cloak their selves in pretend reality. They are like the fake checks that come in snail mail that are actually offers of credit or some other promotion.

This topic was inspired by the blog, Beyond Search, from Arnold IT – specifically their post titled, “Temis, Spammy PR, and Quite Silly Assertions.” Apparently Steve Arnold is as tired as I am of receiving self-glorified propaganda trying to pass as true information and quality content.

This reminds me of the difference between professional taxonomy development by someone like Access Innovations, that can help clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies to manage their content, and those who sell software and run. Do your research and choose a professional who will be there through the entire process.

Melody K. Smith

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

Taxonomy Meetings 2011 – A Year of Change or Realization?

What are the meetings that cater to people who use controlled vocabularies, like taxonomies? Where should a taxonomist go, click, or attend to learn about the latest implementations and uses of controlled vocabulary strategies? Every company thinks long and hard both about what they do and where to find customers for their products and services. The Information Industry is no different. In the Age of the Internet when everyone’s “knows” about searching and information; it seems like the “information Industry” should be booming, its conferences should be huge, and the attendance incredible, but that is not the case. Why? If the information industry and our little taxonomy segment of the business has gone mainstream, then where are all the people you would expect at the long established industry meetings? The meetings we have attended for years are dying on the vine. The SLA Expo was sparse, the Information Today meetings are smaller, Online Information (formerly International Online) was nearly empty, and NFAIS remains the same size each year.  ASIS&T is growing significantly. Frankfurt Book Fair is bigger than ever. Specific User Group meetings are increasingly targeted and well attended.

I believe there are several factors at work. The diminishing meetings have had challenges for years. Nor are we alone in this trend. It is national and perhaps international. Other options are now available. Nationally 126 million people attended meetings in 2009. In 2010 only 80 million attended. “There were 12 percent fewer attendees in 2010 than in 2005 – and 19.7 percent fewer in 2009 than in 2006,”  notes the Baltimore Sun.  The trend is downward significantly even with the problems of the economy. Let’s take them one at a time.

SLA Conference and Expo – an expensive and glitzy meeting held in conjunction with the SLA (aka Special Libraries Association) annual meeting. This meeting has had as many as 7,000 attendees and many auxiliary events such as user group meetings and advisory boards surrounding it. The meeting itself is significantly smaller now. The membership itself is down to half its numbers from 14,000 to about 7,000 including an unknown, but likely held steady, at about 2000 student quotient. This means they no longer command as large an audience. In spite of a well-meaning board trying to cater to the un- and underemployed by reduced fees, the membership has been shrinking. The Expo has held two functions in the industry. One, of course, is to show the companies wares to the attendees, people who work in corporate and other kinds of unusual libraries and often command large purchasing budgets. Second is the meeting of most of the players in the industry in a single exhibit hall allows for intellectual property rights discussions and business arrangements/deals to be made. But several things have happened to make this a less attractive venue.

Years ago SLA mandated that a company could not sponsor a division’s activities, that is get close to the real customer group, unless you were an exhibitor. That meant paying for the booth (about $5000 for the smallest), paying for furniture, electric, carpet, Internet, card reader, plus the art and brochures, and giveaways, etc. (much more than $5000). Then you need staffing for the booth including airfare, hotel for at least two, but usually more staff. (Another $5 – 7,000 in direct cost per person plus a week away from the office.) After that you get to be the target of every division to sponsor their events – at $500 – $5000 each (there are 28 divisions and almost all of them will call you). So SLA needs to be at least $30,000 line item in the budget, but is usually over  $50,000 plus staff labor and opportunity cost. The business aspect of companies (a less degrading label than “vendors”; What are we circus performers?) talking with companies has been good, but the increasing number of companies “suitcasing” (that is, without a booth), has made the exhibitors targets of not only the divisions and SLA, but also those who did not pay the freight to be in the show. Meanwhile, the attendees are walking the aisles, looking for giveaways, not making eye contact since they have no budget to spend.

More recently the Divisions have realized that they could get more out of their target companies, if they held out the carrot of a speaking slot. If you pay X you are a sponsor, if you pay Y you can also have a speaking slot. That all works as long as there is a large audience to talk with. But over the past two years there have been very few people attending the meetings. The sessions of substance are well attended. I went to the Taxonomy related ones and they were often standing room crowds. Buying of speaking slots, however, degrades the programming options and also makes the exhibitors feel cheap. My expertise, which I have been able to found and run a company on, is only worth hearing, if I pay you to listen? It feels like  some kind of prostitution going on here!

At SLA 2011 many sessions had to do with how to get a job, get a raise, change careers, etc. These are helpful to the out of work perhaps, but NOT a persuasive reason for an employer to send a staff member to the meeting. Why should they send their staff to a meeting to learn how to get a different job? The early program was full of such sessions and a turn off to many of the employers and potential attendees I spoke with. They need to send people to the meeting for a skills and industry update and refresher.

So few attendees because the programs are not delivering content and while business discussions for exhibitors have held them in the hall for the past few years, is that enough to make the show a go? Here are new options out there as you will see later in this article.

Over laden with regulations, booth fee increases, and limited staff resources, have resulted in a thin meeting on top of an already downward fiscal spiral for SLA. Can they pull it out? Perhaps they can, but probably not with the current strategy. That exhibit hall finances much of the SLA annual operations. An organization which gets more than half of its annual income from a single face-to-face meeting in the Internet age has some hard thinking to do.

Information Today built its reputation on the once premier meeting in the industry – the National Online Meeting. It sprang into being when SLA and ASIS&T missed the rise of online searching and the incipient internet offerings as a potential big force in their lives. More recently this meeting has been cut into sections and targeted to specific groups like “Computers in Libraries, Internet Librarian, Taxonomy Boot Camp, Knowledge Management World,” and etc. Each of them seems to draw a small, but loyal crowd of attendees. The business aspect of the meeting has been lost, not much deal making goes on here, and the exhibits are shrinking. Here too, if you are a potential exhibitor, you are generally not allowed a speaking slot unless you pony up for a booth.

This has led to a platform of consultants, who plead inability to exhibit, hawking their services from the podium. The quality of the program is diminished and the people with industry knowledge look for another avenue to get to the customer. The previous model of perhaps if they were speaking, they might also exhibit, has changed to no speaking unless you exhibit. Further the segmentation of the meeting has meant that the exhibitors cannot form the deal making side of attendance that is so important to their livelihood.

International Online was also an Information Today meeting (okay, Learned Information and when they sold it they had to change their name to the very successful industry newspaper they publish – not a bad thing). Traditionally held the first week of December in London, it was THE place to be for the buying and selling of digital rights and to see what new things were being released in the New Year. A vibrant, exciting meeting with a crush of people, big parties in the evenings, cutting edge presentations, and many user group meetings surrounding the IOM. One person commented that about 90% of the Intellectual property rights deals and changes for the year happened in that week in December. This year the meeting was a shadow of itself. Most of the big players did not exhibit, very few people walked through the hall. If you set up lots of meetings in advance, it was okay, otherwise a dud. What happened?

It became two unconnected meetings. One was the conference with delegates (attendees) held on the third floor a block away from the exhibit so the attendees seldom came down through the wet London cold to the exhibition. At the same time it became very expensive! Greed in the face of an economic down turn certainly plays a role, but this is not the only factor. Next year it is moving to Docklands from the Olympia and changing the format and venue. The meeting we knew is gone.

NFAIS has gone a different way. It is a membership organization of about 120 companies. But the leverage of the intellectual value added including controlled vocabularies is not the current focus of these former abstracting and indexing organization’s meeting. Their focus is on the “next big thing,” the trends in the industry. The program committee does NOT select member companies to speak. So if you are a member, you will not be on the podium except as a possible moderator. But NFAIS members would like to hear from members who are in a similar situation and find out how they have dealt with the problem. It is a cutting edge meeting, well planned and thought out, but does not grow due to self-imposed limits.

ASIS&T, the American Society for Information Science and Technology is often considered an academic meeting where professors can get their students’ papers on the program to showcase them. The Board is academic. The members are a mix, more academic than practitioners, but still a fair number of people looking for new technologies and a way to implement them on the home front. I used to survey the audience and decided it was in three segments. The academics sat in the front of the hall ready to comment and debate with the speaker, the practitioners and managers in the middle soaking up what they could from the presentations and questions, and the entrepreneurs and other misfits in the back, standing or on the aisles with an easy exit plan.  It is still that way except that the middle has thinned out considerably. The meeting this year was a pleasant surprise on many fronts. It was a substantive program. Lots of hard hitting application and real life talks, less of the presentations on a sample of 10 – 30 and extrapolating unrealistic results. The talks were longer – 30 minutes and allowed enough time to actually describe the substance and then have penetrating questions. The student papers were moved to a huge poster session – 92 posters replacing the Presidential reception with dinner in the middle and posters around the edge – great for conversations, good learning experiences. Well done. Some even had to do with taxonomies.

But for a lot of application and implementation discussions, the action has moved to the ASIS&T IA Summit. The information architecture meeting now has as many attendees as the annual meeting (around 700 people) and has its own Web site and branding. Here it is far less academic and much more hands on discussions. I found the meetings clannish, but the discussions were worth listening to.

Frankfurt Book Fair – a few years ago this meeting was only for print publishers, although it was THE meeting for print. But as digital media has taken hold a new pavilion was added and the digital activity in Building 4 is now incredibly active. The rights trading is definitely done at this show now. The parties and the satellite meetings have mostly moved here. Publishers and the Online community have merged to be here in Frankfurt in October.

User Group Meetings – remember they used to be satellite meetings around the bigger meetings, but their members were no longer attending the big meetings. They now go for the shorter, pure vendor update, and presentations, which deal directly with their service, product, or software. They use these specialized events to learn what’s new and how to use it better. It pays off back at the office and you meet others who are using and leveraging the same things. I attended several of these during the year. They were uniformly well attended by enthusiastic people wanting to know more about the products and services so they could better manage their investments. Meetings that are viable are those that engage the attendee and the User Group Meetings. I attended several this year and they are of two types. 1) those which follow the rock star level of presentation – like MarkLogic  and SilverChair, 2) and those which are hands on updates on the applications and use cases to leverage the customer investments like Atypon and Data Harmony.

Summary:

Okay great – we know where the companies are going to get their work done, make deals, and to learn new things, but what about the individual? Where are they going?  What are they now doing to learn and keep skills fresh?

The Internet has made many things possible that were not possible before. We can convene a meeting electronically in a very short time. We can have discussions over Skype or Webex or GoToMeeting. We can develop documents using collaborative wikis.  We can have conference calls for people in many locations and several continents without leaving our desks. People have turned increasingly to webinars and web searching to find new things and answers. We follow blogs to read opinions and discussions to add to and enjoy.

If we go to a meeting, we are expecting something else. We want to find community. We want to build relationships, which can then be maintained on the Web once they are established. We want to have discussions. We want to help build, brainstorm, learn, and develop in a group setting. We want to make a deal, discuss the terms, and build trust, face to face. Teaching new skills, reading thought pieces, and announcements can now be done in a web-enabled environment.

Selling (Prostitution) of the speaking slots by the real vendors, those who put on the shows, has had a deleterious effect on the quality of the meetings. The costs have reached a tipping point where they no longer provide a good return on investment for attendee or exhibitor. It is no longer useful to have a big party for your users or to set up a user group meeting in conjunction with one of the big national meetings. But more than that, the challenge remains on how to engage the attendee. How can they be part of the meeting rather than a passive audience? How do you get a sense of community?

There are several budding online communities, which seem to be flourishing. Taxonomy Community of practice is one; the Taxonomy Division of SLA is another. The ones on LinkedIn and Facebook have not yet taken off. The rest are in user groups. Access Innovation’s Data Harmony User Group meeting will be held in Albuquerque February 7-9, 2012.

Come join the community!

Marjorie M.K. Hlava
President, Access Innovations

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