10th Annual Semantic Technology & Business Conference

The Semantic Technology & Business Conference celebrates its 10th year, and the predictions indicate that it will be better than ever. It is also becoming increasingly relevant to the modern business world. Semantic technologies are being used to generate revenue, save money, and solve real problems. The Semantic Technology & Business Conference brings together today’s industry leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities jointly impacting both corporate business leaders and technologists.

This year’s event will be held in San Jose, CA on August 19-21, 2014 and will feature innovative panels, case studies, tutorials, roundtables, keynotes, and lightning sessions to explore how businesses and companies utilize semantic solutions. To honor the decade long event, they are also holding the second Hackathon.

For more information about sponsoring or speaking, click here. Registration will be live soon.

Melody K. Smith

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

Access Innovations Named in KMWorld’s Annual “100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management”

Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in digital data organization, announces its inclusion on KMWorld’s annual list of the “Top 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management.”

Access Innovations, Inc. is featured for its third year, after debuting on the list in 2005. Other notable companies given a spot on the 2014 top 100 list include Adobe, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

“Criteria for inclusion vary, but all companies have things in common. Access Innovations, Inc. has proven to define the spirit of practical innovation by blending sparkling technology with a deep, fundamental commitment to customer success,” says Hugh McKellar, KMWorld editor-in-Chief.

Marjorie M. K. Hlava, president of Access Innovations, says she is honored by her company’s accolade. “Access Innovations prides itself on pushing the edges of technology to meet the needs of the next generation of knowledge management,” she says. “It’s challenging and rewarding to be at the cutting edge of knowledge management, and it’s delightful to be recognized as a leader in the field, making content findable for our customers and their users,”

The Top 100 Companies That Matter list is compiled annually by editorial colleagues, analysts, theorists and practitioners. Unlike many other trade lists, inclusion is not purchased and is at the sole discretion of KMWorld’s editors.

For a full list of the Top 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management, pick up the March issue of KMWorld, which is available on newsstands now, or click here to view the online article.

About Access Innovations, Inc.

Founded in 1978, Access Innovations has extensive experience with Internet technology applications, master data management, database creation, thesaurus/taxonomy creation, and semantic integration. Access Innovations’ Data Harmony software includes automatic indexing, thesaurus management, an XML Intranet System (XIS), and metadata extraction for content creation developed to meet production environment needs. Data Harmony is used by publishers, governments, and corporate clients throughout the world.

About KMWorld

The leading information provider serving the knowledge, document, and content management systems market, KMWorld informs more than 45,000 subscribers about the components and processes—and subsequent success stories—that together offer solutions for improving business performance. KMWorld is a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc.

Technology Openings

We are always excited to share with our readers career opportunities in the world of taxonomy, indexing, and even semantic technology. 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.

Apple is looking for a Siri Language Engineer fluent in Cantonese in Santa Clara, CA. If you meet these narrow specifications, you could be responsible for the international engineering of Siri. From speech recognition to natural language processing, machine learning, big data consumption all the way to speech synthesis, you will be involved.

Continuing down the “cool jobs” theme, Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, CA is looking for someone for their Business Intelligence and Analytics Graduate PhD Internship.

If you are in the middle of hunting for a job, best of luck in your endeavors.

Melody K. Smith

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

Information Sharing Positions Available

Looking for a new job? Or maybe you just want to keep tabs on the industry? We are always excited to share career opportunities in the world of taxonomy, indexing, and information management 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.

The Children’s Campaign in Florida is looking for a Knowledge Navigator/Consultant. I like that job title and really, aren’t we all knowledge navigators? To learn more about this position, click here.

While we are sharing, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is looking for a Dryad Librarian. Before you ask, I read to find out what Dryad was as well. Dryad is a curated, general-purpose repository that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Interesting.

Melody K. Smith

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

The Changing Challenges for Semantic Enrichment

Changes and trends in information technology are perhaps best discovered by examining what users of IT say about how they’re using it. One of those opportunities is happening soon. Every year, Access Innovations hosts a meeting for users of the company’s Data Harmony software products. The theme of this year’s Data Harmony Users Group meeting  is “Then and Now: Addressing the Changing Needs of Semantic Enrichment.” This begs some questions: Just what are the new challenges that semantic enrichment needs to meet? And why are the needs changing? Some preliminary answers may be found in the DHUG meeting agenda.

On Monday, February 10, Jay Ven Eman (Access Innovations’ CEO) will give a presentation on “Leveraging Your Semantic Enrichment Investment.” He asks (and presumably will answer, at least in part), “How far can you push semantic enrichment? … What processes and tools are needed?” It is easy to imagine numerous organizations asking the same questions in one form or another. Those who have some familiarity with semantic enrichment can sense the scope of possibilities. They are asking semantic enrichment to accomplish more for their information assets. They want to push semantic enrichment technologies. These expectations put demands on the related processes and tools, which in turn are given expanded capabilities. And with new possibilities, the cycle continues.

On Tuesday, February 11, Marcie Zaharee of The MITRE Corporation will present a case study, “Taxonomies as a Tool to Increase Discovery of Intelligence Community Data Assets.” Access Innovations’ taxonomy/thesaurus software, Thesaurus Master, was used as a taxonomy management tool. The taxonomy that MITRE built was used as an aid in populating metadata fields, with the immediate goal of increasing discovery of data assets. The bigger goal was to promote data visibility, accessibility, and understandability for Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR) data. Accomplishing this, in a very complex modern world, calls for taxonomy development capabilities that provide detailed hierarchical relationships, software recognition of the many ways in which each concept and each piece of equipment can be described, and the ability to specify associations among related concepts.

That presentation will be followed by another case study, “Public Library of Science Thesaurus: Year One.” Rachel Drysdale of the Public Library of Science (PLOS) will discuss the process of building the thesaurus, and of integrating it into the PLOS journals workflow and publication platform. These activities are representative of those of the various online publication and research platforms that have been springing up since the establishment of the Internet. The growing volume of digital materials in digital journals and databases requires excellent search capabilities, which require the integration of semantic enrichment tools into publication platforms.

Large volumes of publishing data beg for analysis and interpretation, in order to manage that data and the underlying platform. Kevin Boyack of SciTech Strategies will show how a comprehensive map of the scientific literature was used to visualize the PLOS thesaurus. The visualization, based on semantic enrichment in the form of the metadata associated with each article, can be used to show coverage and trends for various entities such as journals, institutions, and even individual authors. This is a new way of utilizing the data made available by semantic enrichment.

On Wednesday, February 12, John Kuranz and Kathryn Brown of Access Integrity will discuss the automated use of taxonomy-based metadata for medical coding and verification purposes. This new technology combines a semantic enrichment, rule-based taxonomy tool with comprehensive medical coding datasets. The IntegraCoder concept extractor software analyzes text in electronic medical records and recommends relevant codes, significantly increasing coder productivity and efficiency. (For further information, see http://integracoder.com/, or view a Youtube video.) The development of this technology answers needs caused by the increasing complexity of the coding systems required for billing and statistical purposes. In turn, this increasing complexity has been a result of the rapid advances in medical diagnosis and treatment in recent decades.

Next, Bob Kasenchak, Access Innovations’ production coordinator, will give a presentation on “Leveraging Semantic Fingerprinting for Building Author Networks.” As online publishing platforms and their content assets have grown, and as researchers have proliferated, so have the problems resulting from multiple authors with similar or identical names, and from the many individual authors who have gone by various names. Similarly, specification of author affiliations has become difficult, because of the variety of names that any given institution may have gone through by this point in history. Semantic enrichment techniques that identify authors and institutions now need to rise to the challenge. Bob points out that “With the rise of ORCID and other universal databases of researchers and institutions, it is increasingly crucial for publishers to sort out their own data containing named entities.” His talk will explain Access Innovations’ approach to clarifying author identities so that a solid foundation exists for author networks.

Kirk Sanders, an editorial services project manager at Access Innovations will present a case study on “Data Harmony Custom Features as Implemented for Triumph Learning.” The Triumph Learning project, which required representation of the new Common Core educational standards and associated concepts in a thesaurus, called for complex mapping techniques to establish connections among the various metadata values. The nature of the metadata required expanded display options, which required a custom export format. The new semantic enrichment techniques represented in this project can be seen as meeting the challenges represented by advances in educational standards and philosophies.

A common thread in these presentations is that our world is changing. It is becoming more complex and, in many ways, more advanced. New techniques for semantic enrichment are a response to the needs created by these changes.

Barbara Gilles, Taxonomist
Access Innovations

Enterprise Information Architecture Director Sought

Continuing to be as helpful as possible to those in the fields of taxonomy, indexing, ontology, etc., we are always 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.

An unknown company in Cleveland, Ohio is looking for a Director, Enterprise Information Architecture. Even though they listed anonymously, the job description identifies the position as clearly healthcare related.

“The Director, Enterprise Information Architecture will be responsible for the design and execution of the Medical Mutual Information architecture, across multiple data types (structured, semi-structured, unstructured; administrative and clinical, internal and external), ensuring Health Informatics and other analytical functions/systems have efficient access to accurate integrated data.”

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.

Data Analyst Sought

As we strive to be as helpful as possible to those in the fields of taxonomy, indexing, ontology, etc., we are always 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.

Visionaire Partners are looking for a data analyst whose duties would be specifically tailored to harvesting unstructured data, taxonomies, and data extraction. This firm is located in Norcross, Georgia, but the job is open for wherever you live. It is nice to see organizations embrace the technology and allow flexibility in job situations. For more information, check out the full post here.

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.

Information and Data Governance/Management – How to Start

The link between business and information technology is the data, information, and process assets that are stored and automated through technical tools. This blog suggests the first steps toward governing and managing these important assets before tool implementation, helping to avoid the too common “graveyards” of expensive, underused tools.

Identify business critical information and data

In order to get past the confusion of rapidly evolving types, formats, risks, and tools, first identify the most important information and data assets for your organization and start treating them like assets. These assets may already be known but not documented, or identifying them may require chartering and funding a project. Critical information and data assets vary widely across organizations and departments. They need to be based on the core products, expertise, and risks of an organization, which also may need to be identified. For example, data from production machinery and its interpretation could be an unrecognized competitive asset. In other cases, information and data may not yet be regarded as critical assets, but regulatory scrutiny may be about to change that perception.

The identification and listing of important information and data assets should include brief descriptions, the most recent owner, and a relative value. This high level overview is intended to enable discussions about assets, prioritization of work and investments, and the creation of general policies. It should not be confused with the detailed, time-consuming asset management inventories for which records managers and librarians are trained. It is, however, the first step toward governance and “thoughtful localization and organization,” proven techniques which can later be the basis for advanced management techniques such as developing and using metadata, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies. The overview can employ simple, existing tools such as a spreadsheet or database that can aid in analysis and produce reports.

The first goal is to initiate discussions about how information and data assets support organizational strategies and to determine what governance and management programs are needed. Governance is the exercise of control over multiple operations through accountability frameworks and priorities. It may take some time to build out all the needed policies and measurements regarding decision rights, alignment, and communication, but the discussions will get the work started. Management, which is the exercise of control over day-to-day operations, decisions, work, people, or things, will come later and will comply with governance policies.

Assign an Information and Data Governance Focal Point

Responsibility for information and data governance needs to be assigned if progress is expected, even if the organization is not ready to fund a full-scale program. A part-time person can be responsible for the information and data asset list, act as an authenticating gatekeeper for changes, and make sure that it is discussed at appropriate high-level meetings. With a little bit of additional time the assignee could set up and publicize a mail box or shared site for collecting issues, ideas, and needs, compile them, and recommend projects that are worthy of investment.

Further Steps

The steps above are the beginning and will help to determine where effort, investment, and tools can be justified and what should be accomplished. Much additional work is needed to realize more significant competitive advantages, provide complete functional requirements for tools, and meet regulatory requirements.

Keeping in mind the principle that information is best understood and used by its primary users, governance, standardization, normalization, and coordination may be needed across departments to achieve strategic quality and integrity goals. In addition, specific, detailed, ongoing programs and organizations may be needed for information and data management, funded to evolve, grow, and change as uses, formats, and values fluctuate with business and regulatory changes.

Incrementally, over time, or as the result of concentrated, planned projects, a deeper understanding of needs can be achieved, and more advanced management techniques can be justified, funded, and adopted. Examples include more advanced techniques for asset valuation, cooperative metadata and vocabulary adoption and use, development of competitive information and data techniques, and strategic asset based service level agreements with vendors and operating level agreements with internal groups.

In most cases, over time, it will be beneficial to incorporate principles, standards, and best practices from a variety of complementary disciplines which have found successful ways to deal with the issues – records management, information science, library science, ISO, ANSI, related industries, project management, organizational change, and COBIT and ITIL frameworks for IT governance and management.

Watch future blog postings for more details on this subject.

Judith Gerber (guest blogger), JGG Enterprises

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

Access Innovations, Inc. Selects Heather Kotula as DHUG Meeting and Marketing Coordinator

Heather Kotula, a long-time employee of Access Innovations, Inc., has recently been promoted to the position of DHUG (Data Harmony Users Group) Meeting and Marketing Coordinator. Heather is one of many faces of fresh, young talent at Access Innovations, and her promotion can only mean good things for the company.

Ms. Kotula started with Access Innovations in 1995, and has since filled many positions within the company and seen it grow over many years. She has worked in finance, as a project manager, office manager, and Vice President of Operations. Her versatility in her early years at Access Innovations gave her a strong background and knowledge of the company, and these have translated into new marketing ideas and skills that will propel the company forward.

Ms. Kotula has coordinated the past three DHUG meetings, and her new position within the company puts her at the forefront of new ideas for the annual DHUG gatherings. These meetings include two days of case studies and presentations and three days of software training. Access Innovations’ clients from around the world attend to present case studies, get training in the use of the Data Harmony software, network with other users, and become acquainted with the team at Access Innovations. As well as putting these meetings together, she handles and oversees the marketing endeavors at Access Innovations. She is always working to keep the company up to date, as well as providing ways to communicate the company’s products and services to the world to benefit others.

“The changes in the world of information over the past 20 years are astounding,” commented Ms. Kotula recently. “Since the founding of the company in 1978, Access Innovations has been preparing and waiting for the ‘Information Age’ to arrive.  We have the best tools and an unparalleled breadth of experience in taking information from archive to actionable asset.”

Heather received her Bachelor’s degree in Distributed Foreign Languages from the University of New Mexico in 1991. Before she received her degree, Heather also attended the Goethe Institut in Munich and took German language classes there, as well as attending the Scuola Dante Alighieri in Florence, Italy where she received a Certificate of Fluency in Italian language. Heather received her Master’s degree in Business Administration from New Mexico State University in 1995.

 

About Access Innovations – www.dataharmony.com, www.taxodiary.com

Founded in 1978, Access Innovations has extensive experience with Internet technology applications, master data management, database creation, thesaurus/taxonomy creation, and semantic integration. The Access Innovations Data Harmony software includes automatic indexing, thesaurus management, an XML Intranet System (XIS), and metadata extraction for content creation developed to meet production environment needs. Data Harmony is used by publishers, governments, and corporate clients throughout the world.

Beyond Storage

We have discussed numerous times in the past about the rapid growth of data. The main focus has always seemed to surround the storage and management of the data. But what about the risk and liability to organizations?

There is a significant opportunity to tap into this data to deliver increased productivity and greater strategic insight. This interesting information came from eWeek in their article, “Information Governance: Why It’s Becoming a Boardroom Imperative.”

Information governance is the set of multi-disciplinary structures, policies, procedures, processes, and controls implemented to manage information at an enterprise level, supporting an organization’s immediate and future regulatory, legal, risk, environmental, and operational requirements. Information governance goes beyond retention and disposition to include privacy, access controls, and other compliance issues.

Melody K. Smith

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

Next Page »