Taxodiary – Access Insights

Plan Now to Attend the Data Harmony Users Group Meeting, February 18 – 20, 2013

By Melody Smith|January 3rd, 2013|Access Insights, News, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Plan Now to Attend the Data Harmony Users Group Meeting, February 18 – 20, 2013

Registration is now open for the Ninth Annual Data Harmony Users Group Meeting. Sessions will be held February 18-20, 2013 at Access Innovations, 4725 Indian School Road NE, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The DHUG meeting focuses on helping users get the most from their investment in the knowledge management software suite, which supports user organization of their information resources based on a well-built and systematically applied taxonomy or thesaurus.

RDF: A Wrapper for Metadata

By Melody Smith|December 31st, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, metadata|Comments Off on RDF: A Wrapper for Metadata

In information management, a wrapper is a program that translates tagged data into relational form, so that databases can deal with it. We’re interested in this because some of that tagged data includes subject terms, keywords, or whatever you want to call taxonomy terms that have been used to describe documents.

Dublin Core: Sort of a Metadata Standard

By Melody Smith|December 24th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, metadata|Comments Off on Dublin Core: Sort of a Metadata Standard

The Dublin Core metadata guidelines started in 1995 in Dublin, Ohio which is why they are called the Dublin Core. The beginning was actually in the basement of the OCLC building, in March of 1995. In April of 1996, the Dublin Core advocates went to Warwick, England, where they had another conference. So there are Warwick Conventions for the Dublin Core. So there’s no mystery about the names; these things are just named after the places where they started.

Taxonomies and Metadata

By Melody Smith|December 17th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, metadata, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Taxonomies and Metadata

Let’s talk about metadata a little bit. This is to give you a broad overview so that you know how to build those taxonomies. Metadata is data about data, which means it is really information about information. If you look at the metadata standards world and especially the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, it has suddenly taken flight again. It’s really interesting. Dublin Core is 10 years old or so and has suddenly become more relevant again.

A Look at Markup Languages

By Melody Smith|December 10th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, metadata|Comments Off on A Look at Markup Languages

The most frequently used markup languages these days are those of the SGML family: SGML, HTML, and XML. Information professionals are likely to encounter all three fairly often.

Access Innovations named to EContent magazine’s annual 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry

By Melody Smith|December 4th, 2012|Access Insights, News|Comments Off on Access Innovations named to EContent magazine’s annual 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry

Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in digital data organization, is proud to announce its inclusion on EContent magazine’s annual list of the top 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry.

A Brief History of Markup Languages

By Melody Smith|December 3rd, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Standards|Comments Off on A Brief History of Markup Languages

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 3rd, 2012|Access Insights, News, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Don’t Miss the Data Harmony Users Group Meeting, February 18 – 20, 2013!

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.

Taxonomies and Standards

By Melody Smith|November 26th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Standards|Comments Off on Taxonomies and Standards

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.

Adopting and Adapting Existing Word Lists and Taxonomies

By Melody Smith|November 19th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, indexing, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Adopting and Adapting Existing Word Lists and Taxonomies

In traditional taxonomy construction, you approach the body of knowledge, head for your ivory tower with its closed room and decide on the general structure of the field or discipline. From that single point, or perhaps multiple points, of knowledge, you are going to design a completely new taxonomy … and every now and then that works.