Data is important, but just how important if it has no structure? After all, without structure, how can it be indexed and recovered when needed down the road? In real-world applications, there have to be patterns and structures that allow content to be findable. Ontologies, taxonomies, indexing, metadata, tags — whatever approach you use must still utilize structure. This interesting information came from DATAVERSITY, in their article, “Big Data Is Not the Death Knell of ETL.”
Structure is the contextual matrix within which the data’s value is realized. Structure is either built into the data from its inception or added to it subsequently. 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.
