It can be tempting to look at a taxonomy and only see it in terms of the search results generated from it. That part of it is very important, no doubt, but taxonomies have far-reaching tendrils that extend deep into many industries, especially publishing. They work subtly and are often invisible to the end user, but the effects can be extraordinarily powerful.
Drawing by Pierre Dénys de Montfort, 1801, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cryptozoology#mediaviewer/File:Colossal_octopus_by_Pierre_Denys_de_Montfort.jpg
Taxonomies interact with and enrich the publication pipeline in so many ways. This is especially apparent in the world of academic publishing, but the principles can be applied throughout the industry.
With the explosion of electronic content, the use of metadata has become increasingly important. Hunting down print records from an archive by hand is simply unacceptable today; documents get lost, forcing the unnecessary duplication of work. This is even more frustrating with electronic content because, in theory, the conversion to digital was supposed to streamline the retrieval process.
It hasn’t really worked out so smoothly. This isn’t simply about finding something with a search function; inefficiencies gum up the works at every stage, costing companies valuable time that could be more effectively used elsewhere. In fact, studies have shown that people in publishing spend up to 35% of their time hunting down information. That’s simply too much time.
Access Innovations’ Data Harmony software products can help clean up the mess, both literally and figuratively. With applications at every stage, from submission to publication, the software suite is specifically designed to improve accuracy and efficiency, from the writer submitting the work to the publisher putting it in a journal, to the end user who needs to access it.
We will examine these ideas in a nine-part series to see just how integral taxonomies are to publishers. Some features will specifically address how Data Harmony works to improve data, while some will be more general. The following topics will be covered:
- THE NEED FOR QUICK PUBLISHING: Academics publishing papers in journals—crucial for tenure—often face months and even years of waiting, sometimes so long that the tenure window passes. How does Data Harmony, specifically Smart Submit, streamline the submission process?
- SEMANTIC ENRICHMENT: The capture of metadata is key to meaningful analysis of content. The resulting metadata allows a user to view content in unique ways to draw previously invisible patterns that dramatically improve the accuracy of content retrieval and enable analytics.
- BY THE NUMBERS: We look at the real cost of slow turnaround in academic publishing—it doesn’t just affect the writer. There is a real cost to publishers when their systems are inefficient.
- INLINE TAGGING—WHEN YOU STILL CAN’T FIND IT: Data Harmony’s constant refinement has now led to inline tagging solutions that allow users to easily zoom in on and identify concepts in a full text document.
- FINGERS IN MANY POTS—FROM SUBMISSION TO PUBLICATION: From Smart Submit to precision search results at the end, Data Harmony has a hand in making each piece of the workflow production pipeline smoother, easier, and more accessible.
- FEEDBACK LOOPS FOR TRULY ACCURATE INDEXING: One of the more interesting aspects of Data Harmony indexing solutions is how they enable constant checking of content extraction effectiveness, so that it becomes ever more accurate with each new piece of added content.
- THE FUTURE—REAL-TIME ANALYSIS OF THE CHANGES IN PUBLISHING: The explosion of content being housed online instead of in print brings up some interesting speculative issues about the future of journal publication.
The series will close with an installment that will demonstrate, on a broader level, that high-quality metadata and accurate taxonomy-based indexing streamline and enrich the publication process. Today’s technology gives publishers the opportunity to enhance the way their journals are compiled and disseminated to the public. However, many publishers have not yet taken advantage of that opportunity. This makes for a frustrating search experience for the end user that, most importantly, does not precisely deliver the content they require.
Ultimately, that end user experience is most crucial, but in order for a system to really work, it requires improved efficiency at every level. Certainly, good semantic enrichment software such as Data Harmony can help with that, but changes in mentality are also required. That doesn’t happen overnight, but the faster that publishers can start to implement new methods of looking at their data and making their content available, the faster that users throughout the pipeline will get true satisfaction from their results.
When the author is satisfied and the publisher is satisfied, the end user wins. That builds trust in your client base, which translates into revenue. That revenue allows the publisher to offer improved and diversified products, leading to a broader user base that is assured of a reliable content offering, which once again, leads to even more revenue. This kind of cycle drives industry to improve upon itself, and good semantic enrichment software such as Data Harmony can facilitate that process.
Daryl Loomis
Access Innovations
