Posts by Melody Smith
Selecting Hardware and Software
by Marjorie M.K. Hlava First published in Information Today, Vol. 1, Issue 4 (April 1984). People are talking endlessly these days about the selection of hardware and software for your business, your library, your home, your children, your education, your games, your home security system, etc. The articles on the topic are numerous, and here’s yet…
Read MoreGood Indexing Means Good Retrieval
by Marjorie M.K. Hlava First published in Information Today So far this column has covered design considerations for the building of a database. Editorial guidelines have been set forth. Fields have been discussed and quantified. The next steps involve the tagging or coding of the data in a uniform manner so it can be pulled…
Read MoreFile Design: Those Important First Steps
By Marjorie M.K. Hlava First published in Information Today In my first column, we discussed general editorial and file size considerations. This column discusses the file design questions and opportunities. The next issue will cover vocabulary control, indexing, and abstracting. Once you’ve set your editorial policy and fleshed out those basic questions on size and…
Read MoreInhouse Database Marketing
by Marjorie M.K. Hlava Marketing an inhouse file is similar to marketing any database. Whether the file is commercial or inhouse, there are two main parts to the marketing. First is marketing the idea of a database to upper management. Second is marketing the completed file to raise revenue for maintaining the database. The first…
Read MoreDatabase Production: Determining the Cost
by Marjorie M.K. Hlava Fiirst published as part of Information Today’s Private Files Series, Volume 1, Issue 7. The costs of database production are extremely variable depending on what kind of data you are dealing with and what you want to do with it. So let’s consider the variables from beginning to end and then…
Read MoreDatabase Building Options and Costs
by Marjorie M.K. Hlava Note: This white paper was first published as part of Information Today‘s Private Files Series, Volume 1, Issue 7. People often comment that the cost estimates for database construction seem exceedingly high. In response to those surprised voices, this paper will explore various options available to those who are building a…
Read MoreCross Language Retrieval – English / Russian / French
Marjorie M.K. Hlava, President, Access Innovations, Inc. Dr. Gerold Belonogov, Professor and Head of Department, VINITI, Moscow, Russia Dr. Boris Kuznetsov, Head of Department, VINITI, Moscow, Russia Richard Hainebach, Director, EPMS bv-Ellis Publications, The Netherlands Note: This Working Paper was presented at the 1997 American Association for Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium Series, March 24 –…
Read MoreOWL Export Module: Data Harmony for the Semantic Web
by Jay Ven Eman, Ph.D., CEO of Access Innovations, Inc. Access Innovations, Inc.What do you make of “198“? You could assume a number. Computer applications make no assumptions since it could be an integer, octal, decimal, etc. Neither you nor the computer could do anything useful with it. What if, we added a period, so…
Read MoreWhat Can You Do with XML Today?
by Jay Ven Eman Interest in Extensible Markup Language (XML) rivals the press coverage the World Wide Web received at the turn of the Millennium. Is it justified? Rather than answer directly, let us take a brief survey of what XML is and why it was developed, and then we can highlight some current XML…
Read MoreBest Practices for Creating and Maintaining a Thesaurus with Thesaurus Master or MAIstro
by Barbara Gilles, Access Innovations thesaurian Observing the practices described below for building a thesaurus will help ensure: Effective searches to enable actual retrieval A rich and functional network of relationships among terms A standards-compliant thesaurus and taxonomy Efficient development of a controlled vocabulary that meets users’ needs 1. Background: The Building Blocks of a…
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