Developing a taxonomy or classification system organized into conceptually similar categories can help users gain a better understanding of the taxonomy subject area. Likewise, an ontology can provide insights into relationships that go beyond grouping of similar concepts. In the case of the recent Time magazine thesaurus showing the relationships of various famous people for 2014, it really is more of an ontology identifying the relationships and correlations. To create a useful ontology, there needs to be a way to evaluate the quality of the knowledge model.
Ontologies and other controlled vocabularies help ensure that machine-assisted or fully automated indexing is comprehensive, regardless of what you are indexing. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies to make their information findable.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
