Not True!

By Melody Smith | May 9, 2011

The Autonomy folks must be getting worried about the progress of taxonomy applications and the precision and recall that such systems provide. Autonomy and Google live on relevance rankings as the return to the user. Relevance to me is a confidence game. It is the best guess of the system as to whether the results returned will actually match the user’s request. If you have a big enough data set returned, certainly something in there will be useful. But the sheer amount of items the user has to review (or amount of noise they have to look at) is very annoying. So they rank the returns by relevance based on a number of statistical factors so the most likely items based on co-occurrence with terms matches and near matches will appear at the top of the list – that is, they will be relevance ranked.

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TaxoBank Adds Pasta Lover’s Thesaurus

By Melody Smith | May 6, 2011

The first new Taxobank entry in quite some time is the Pasta Lover’s Thesaurus, apparently a student project but nevertheless an informative and mouth-watering example of a straightforward hierarchical and relational thesaurus.

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Where Are They Now?

By Melody Smith | May 2, 2011

Tech companies come and go. There are always tech savvy entrepreneurs with big ideas looking to fill a need in the market and investors looking to get the huge returns that only come from investing in tech startups.

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Semantic Technology Monitoring Your Rep

By Melody Smith | May 2, 2011

Online reputation management is a constant topic in today’s social media world. How you use your resources and time searching social media platforms will directly affect the results you get. One author takes the time to review various tools available to monitor your organization’s online reputation.

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Name Disambiguation Musings

By Melody Smith | April 25, 2011 |

The Wall Street Journal on April 19, 2011 talked about the need for customer name authority control in banks. Okay, so maybe that is not what they said. What they did outline was the problem Arabic names and the many ways to state them gives to banks and other organizations which try to track the information or put a hold on funds for organizations like the example, Moammar Gadhafi. Also know as many other names. His first name could be transliterated as Muammar, Mummar, Mohamed Mahmut, Mehmud and more than 20 other variants. The same goes last name could be Gaddafi, Ghathafi, Elkaddafi, El-Kaddafi, Al-Gaddafi, Gadhafi, Qaddafi, Al-Qadhafi, El-Qaddfi, Qadhafi, Abu Miryar Al-Qahafi, Ghadaffi, and others. Any combination of these names is valid. There are further complications of the Abu or Al or El and other designations of honor make things even more interesting.

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Access Innovations Announces Integration of Data Harmony® With Microsoft® SharePoint 2010

By Melody Smith | April 14, 2011

Access Innovations, a leader in the data and content management industry, has announced that its Data Harmony suite of content enrichment and thesaurus management tools can now be fully integrated with Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Data Harmony fills semantic gaps in SharePoint to help users take full advantage of their metadata through auto classification, enterprise taxonomy management, entity extraction, and search enhancements. The end result is information assets that are more searchable and more accessible.

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Taxonomy Standardization is Going On Everywhere

By Melody Smith | April 4, 2011

The entire idea of using a controlled vocabulary, a.k.a. thesaurus, a.k.a. ontology, a.k.a. taxonomy, a.k.a. authority file, a.k.a. a pick list, a.k.a. attribute table –is to standardize the nomenclature an organization uses to tag, keyword, add descriptors, controlled vocabulary, subject heading, content tags, semantic indexing, etc., to their content so it can be found, searched, retrieved,… well, you get the idea.

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