Researchers at Brown University and the Technical University of Berlin have produced a program that identifies simple sketches of objects almost as well as humans. Police and other law enforcement agencies use a similar technology to identify mug shots, but this technology goes farther by identifying more cartoonish features.

This interesting and entertaining news was brought to our attention by Wired in their article, “Program learns to recognise rough sketches of objects.” The developers are planning to expand the database to include more categories by launching a Pictionary-style game that can collect the data that players input. One version is already available on iTunes.

This technology can only work with a solid taxonomy to reference. It has never been more important to approach knowledge organization or taxonomy management based on accepted and shared standards. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies that can help you generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.

Melody K. Smith

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