Access Insights
What’s in a name?
Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)
True, but try finding the right document set for your current project by sniffing them out from within a database of 8 million similar smelling documents. This approach is all too common, very time consuming, and unreliable leaving you with aromatic, unpalatable results.
Read MoreAccess Innovations Receives U.S. Patent for Unique MAIChem™ Software Search Method
Software Provides Fast, In-Depth, Broad and Consistently Accurate Searches of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industry Data
Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in data integrity and content creation, has announced it has been awarded a U.S. Patent No. 8,046,212 for MAIChem™, a software-based method for searching chemical names in one or more text-containing documents that have been loaded into computer memory.
Read MoreASIST in the Big Easy
The ASIST meeting was held in the delightful city of New Orleans this fall. The format, as well as the dates for the meeting was quite different this year and I found it refreshing. This is usually a heavily academic meeting and I go to keep my ears open to the research and trends that the Information Science and Library Schools are talking about. Every now and then there is a nugget I can use to enhance our products and services.
Read MoreSemantic Risks
In a recent issue focusing on risk one article in Bloomberg Businessweek made the statement, “Such semantics may feel like distinctions without a difference. For underwriters in the specialty market of political-violence insurance, though, they’re crucial.” The semantic distinctions had to do with the labeling of political “protests” in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. I put “protests” in quotes to draw attention to the issue of semantics and its impact on insurance and risk assessment.
Read MoreThe Impact of Apple
The passing of Steve Jobs gives us a chance to reflect on the business in general and, of course, how it affects us. The many incredible things he did and his inventions are very well covered in other more appropriate venues. The world changed significantly on his watch and he drove others to make amazing strides. We always admired the Apple systems and in fact were the first commercial installation of Apple IIe’s in (at least in New Mexico) 1980. We bought 22 of the 48K main memory machines with single sided floppy 5.25 inch drives holding 512 K of data at one time. We had one machine with two floppy drives where we would copy the data for safe back up before transferring it to 9 track 1600 bpi tape on the Wang system for eventual conversion and delivery to the clients.
Read MoreNaïveté? Hardly.
Is it really naïve to think two complimentary domains can be described by taxonomies and then mapped? Authors Robert L. Glass and Iris Vessey, in a recent Viewpoints column in IEEE Software published by the IEEE Computer Society, titled, “Naïveté Squared: In Search of Two Taxonomies and a Mapping Between Them” concluded they were naïve. The authors have long thought, there needs to be “a taxonomy of application domains; a taxonomy of solution approaches; and a mapping between the two.” They feel they were naïve because, despite promoting the need for several decades, it hasn’t happened. Or so they think.
Read MoreOpen Net – What a site!
I was doing some poking around to find out about OpenNet (which the Department of State uses), and I came across a DOE implementation of it (they apparently helped invent it.) Clicking the author link works really well! The site is clean and crisp. Very professional looking.
Read MoreNatural Language Processing Only Goes So Far
The sirens call of natural language processing has been issued again. In this study, the researchers compared the use for free text searches to administrative codes to see which would give better indication of safety based on 20 indicators. The authors rightly suggest that instead of relying only on the notoriously poor check boxes used with discharge orders that the hand written notes form the discharge nurse or physician might be much more instructive.
Read MoreFinding New Among the Old
Indexing is becoming one of the key information management methods. That is not new news. The fascination of categorizing and putting vast information in a findable form is what drives good taxonomy building.
Read MoreLarge Data Sets and Ever Changing Terminology
Indexing enables accurate, consistent retrieval to the full depth and breadth of the collection. This does not mean that the statistics-based systems the government loves so much, will go away but, they are learning to embrace the addition of taxonomy terms as indexing.
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