The Need for a Taxonomy

November 16, 2011 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on The Need for a Taxonomy

Many sophisticated semantic search tools build ontologies and taxonomies to organize the data. David Patterson, the co-founder and CEO of Sophia Search, doesn’t think this is necessary and seeks freedom from taxonomies or ontologies.

Bio-IT World brought this to our attention in their article, “Making Semantic Sense of Unstructured Data.” Patterson believes people are so accustomed to building taxonomies and ontologies because they think it is required, but he seeks to build a search tool that doesn’t rely on back ground knowledge structures. Instead the search tool can find relationships without a common source or taxonomy.

It seems hard to believe you could get quality, comprehensive search results without the solid foundation of a standards based taxonomy. Without a taxonomy to index data, there are no smooth flows through a decision tree and valuable business intelligence is lost. Building a solid taxonomy requires experience and standards – both of which Access Innovations has in spades. Access Innovations’ solutions are ANSI compliant and implement state-of-the-art technology to speed tagging and reduce errors.

Melody K. Smith

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

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.