Building a thesaurus for a digital library of more than 1,500 academic journals, 15,000 scholarly books and other sources, is no easy task. Currently there is no one single thesaurus that holds the terms to cover all the subjects included in these collections. Nancy Murray, Associate Director, Metadata for JSTOR is taking on that challenge with the assistance of Access Innovations and Data Harmony.
Many users of Data Harmony are intimidated by data visualization. Maybe intimidated is the wrong word, but they certainly have anxiety around seeing their analysis in images vs. lists of tens of thousands words.
Once the world was slow moving and you could anticipate the next year to be much like the current. This world is no longer slow moving, in fact it is on warp speed as technology drives more connectivity in the moment. The Internet provides access to all. Librarians are no longer the gatekeepers of information. The entire business model of information has changed. "We are doing business at the speed of thoughts," says Margie Hlava, President and CEO of Access Innovations. During her keynote presentation at the 9th Annual Data Harmony Users Group this week, Hlava looked back at where we've been while looking forward at how Access Innovations is responding to the new industries and challenges technology has brought us.
In what appears to be a timely presentation, John Kuranz, CEO of Access Integrity, walked the group gathered at the 9th Annual Data Harmony Users Group through the major events that are taking place in healthcare. We talked extensively about the ICD-10 coding classification that will be implemented on October 1, 2014. Many are facing the challenges that implementation poses, and then not far behind that is ICD-11 going live in 2014.
Tuesday was the opening day for the 9th Annual Data Harmony Users Group. Unlike the Olympics, there were no industrial revolution references, Harry Potter's nemisis nor James Bond made an appearance, and Danny Boyle's nod to his childhood did not make the agenda. However, this small group of 60+ was globally represented with attendees and presenters from Holland, Bristol, Spain, India, and New Jersey.
Most of you who have studied library science or information science are familiar with faceted classification as developed by Indian mathematician and librarian S. R. Ranganathan (1892-1972). His main contribution was the colon classification system the first faceted classification. It allowed multiple multiple classifications to be assigned to an object, rather than a single pre-coordinated taxonomic designation. Dr. Ranganathan is still pretty popular in the search world, especially in e-commerce. The Endeca faceted search module is popular with online marketers, because they are looking at lots of different kinds of ways to filter data.
Last time, I told you that inverted files and Boolean are basic to most or all search. So, what we have is the inverted file – that big alphabetical list of all the terms and where they came from – and a way to combine them. At the end of the day, no matter which direction you come from on the high end and even higher presentation levels, you are depending on these two to make it work. If you add that taxonomy to that, you are strengthening the use of your terms.
We're busy putting the final preparations on the Ninth Annual Data Harmony Users Group Meeting. This year's meeting is gearing up to be our biggest and best meeting yet! If we can assist you as you plan your trip to Albuquerque, please contact Heather Kotula or Susan Burritt at any time.
Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in semantic enrichment, has teamed up with the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and IOP Publishing (IOP) to create a new astronomy thesaurus called the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) for the American Astronomical Society (AAS) that will help improve future information discovery for researchers.
There are search systems that are advertised as keyword search. There are ones that say that they are Bayesian. There are ones that are Boolean. There are ones that are primarily ranking algorithms.