Melody Smith

A Brief History of Markup Languages

By Melody Smith | December 3, 2012

Let’s look at the history of the MLs a little bit. Those are the markup languages for computer text processing.

Markup languages started appearing in the 1960s. At that time, if you were a publisher, you would have your pages typeset by a professional typesetter or a typesetting company. The typesetters used to encode your data so that you couldn’t see the results until they generated the pages. The problem was that once a publisher had a large corpus of their publications set with a typesetter, they were handcuffed. They couldn’t leave very easily. Their data was so tied up with some particular typesetting system, the Penta system or whatever they were involved with. They couldn’t migrate. They couldn’t move. So, they were kind of imprisoned. The price kept going up every year because, well, “Where are you going to go? Hah!” It was very frustrating.

Don’t Miss the Data Harmony Users Group Meeting, February 18 – 20, 2013!

By Melody Smith | December 3, 2012

Here is a sneak peek at two of the in-depth case studies you will hear about during the meeting:

Developing the PLOS Thesaurus: Jonas Dupuich of PLOS will tell the story of how PLOS identified the need to improve its thesaurus, completed the task of updating the thesaurus, and implemented services to leverage the thesaurus throughout the organization in partnership with Access Innovations. Expect to hear about lessons learned, best practices, and a glance at how PLOS is moving forward from here.

Where Are You in the Plan?

By Melody Smith | December 3, 2012

With the deadline for the ICD-10 coding classification transition getting closer and closer, only 85% of healthcare professionals are evening acknowledging the scope of the project and less than that had even started the implementation process.

Managing Our Data

By Melody Smith | November 30, 2012

Each and every day we create metadata in our emails, texts, Word documents, spreadsheets, and more. When you multiply that by the five billion people in the world, well, you get the picture. Human-generated content is growing by the second. How do we manage it? How do we search it?

Search and Semantics

By Melody Smith | November 30, 2012

Search engine optimization is a constant challenge for marketers, and that may have gotten easier or more difficult with semantic technology. The users can go either way on that one.

Winning with Social Media

By Melody Smith | November 29, 2012

The power of social media has often been discussed here. The power it possesses in connecting with customers and consitutuents cannot be debunked. One of our own Access programmers is utilizing social media to reach his own constituents. Alexander Lyons is a gifted musical artist in addition to writing amazing code for us. He has recently released his debut CD – My First Ten – full of his own original material.

Healthcare Organizations Prepare for the Deadline

By Melody Smith | November 28, 2012

Health Revenue Assurance Holdings was selected by the Summa Health System to provide ICD-10 transition services. This is another in a chain of healthcare providers moving forward towards meeting the deadline of October 2014.

Data Provides Opportunities

By Melody Smith | November 28, 2012

Data is everywhere: on the Web, within an enterprise, in both closed and open academic communities, across every technological field or surface available. The Hindu brought this information to our attention in their article, “Connecting the dots, lucratively.” The frequency and availability of data provide an opportunity for analytics, and analytics can provide perspective.

Deadlines and Plans

By Melody Smith | November 27, 2012

If you look at the calendar and you rely on ICD coding, it is easy to see we are two years away from the much dreaded deadline for the ICD-10 implementation. Where are you in your plan for preparation and implementation?

Taxonomies and Standards

By Melody Smith | November 26, 2012

We’ve discussed what it takes to make the components of a digital information model work but one of the things that is most important, if you want it all to work together, is standards.

There are several controlled vocabulary standards, as well as networking protocols that have an impact on taxonomy implementation. There are also standards having to do with markup and with metadata and data modeling that impact thesauri.