Information is valuable. Few would argue that point. How do you begin to put a number or a cost to your information? It is easy to apply numbers to software, hardware, and man hours – but what about the content? If you were to sell your information, what would be the selling price? These interesting thoughts came from ArunsPlace in their post, “The Strange Economics Of Information.”
Informational goods are not much different from, say, a new musical album. All the costs of a new album are incurred prior to selling. A number is decided upon, and after the initial product is complete, it is just a matter of reproducing the same digital content and transmitting it to the users. Like informational goods, it has to be experienced in order to be valued. How important the information is to you will not be realized until you have paid for and consumed the information.
Information cannot be valuable if it cannot be found. Automated indexing is a comprehensive approach to making content findable – making information findable. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies with integrated indexing rule bases to make their information findable.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
