Technology continues to advance on a daily basis. What was wondrously new yesterday will seem archaic in just a few months. This advancement of technology has brought information to our fingertips at a faster speed than ever before, and in extraordinary quantities. KMWorld brought this news to our attention in their article, “Universal, federated or unified search in the land of information silos.”

Information access and retrieval within most organizations is not a smooth process. Few organizations have one simple search system for all their data. Most have multiple options, and that number grows with the size of the organization. The challenge with this situation is not allowing the data to become entities in and of themselves – entities that create walls of division.

Taxonomies 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.