MEDLINE citations are manually indexed at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), using as reference the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) controlled vocabulary. In the past, human indexers read the full text of the article to properly index. However, due to growth, the NLM is exploring automatic indexing options. 7th Space Interactive brought this topic to our attention in their article, “MeSH indexing based on automatically generated summaries.”
Apple recently purchased Topsy, a social media analytics company. This move left some folks wondering why. For some, the answer was clear - search, old search to be exact. In a move to challenge Google's reign as the premier search engine, Apple's $200 million dollar purchase is intended to provide new levels of recommendations based on Topsy's data. Don't scoff at the price, there are billions of dollar in play when you are talking about the game of search.
As taxonomists, we have a responsibility to discern those future concepts, although they may still be invisible to most. We can save the various expressions of those concepts in search logs from being rejected from consideration for a vocabulary simply on account of their as yet infrequent appearance. In a taxonomy or thesaurus, we can provide labels that will consolidate the indexing for a concept whose researchers have not yet settled on a name. In some cases, especially with widely used vocabularies, we can perhaps determine the name by which a concept will be known on a standard basis.
Floating around the Milky Way galaxy is the most recent space observatory launched by the European Space Agency (ESA). Gaia will monitor each of its target stars about 70 times over a period of five years - all unmanned.
SemantiStar has launched Epsilon, the first semantically enabled eLearning application for iPad. This new product is designed to connect learners contextually with course material and real-world knowledge and events. This interesting news was brought to our attention by gnom.es in their article, “SemantiStar, Inc. Announces the Launch of Epsilon.”
ADmantX has announced that ADmantX semantic features are now live on Adform, whose customers will automatically be able to access the ADmantX rich set of semantic data to improve their campaign success. This interesting information was found on Technology-Digital in their article, “Adform and ADmantX Partner to Deliver Advanced Brand Safety and Contextual Targeting Within Adform’s DSP.”
Professor Deborah L. McGuinness has been selected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). McGuinness is a web scientist, which is what AAAS cites as the reason for her recognition. Her contributions to the Semantic Web, knowledge representation, and reasoning environments will be part of the honor ceremony at its annual meeting in February 2014 in Chicago.