Taxodiary – Access Insights

A Cloud Drifting Toward a Classification

By Melody Smith|November 11th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, indexing, Taxonomy|1 Comment

Recently, I was watching a show on the Weather Channel about the “discovery” of a previously unrecognized type of cloud. This intrigued me, as I’ve always wondered how the “official” classifications of various kinds of things come about, and just who has the authority somehow to establish the classifications and terminology. We all know at least some of the standard cloud types – cirrus, cumulus, cumulonimbus, etc. (If you want to know all the types and subtypes, check out Wikipedia’s “List of cloud types”.) Who decided on those names and types, and why?

Access Innovations’ Taxonomy Client Public Library of Science (PLOS) Unveils PLOS ONE Platform

By Melody Smith|November 4th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured|Comments Off on Access Innovations’ Taxonomy Client Public Library of Science (PLOS) Unveils PLOS ONE Platform

PLOS ONE unveiled its new e-journal platform last month, with Subject Area browsing capability made possible by the PLOS thesaurus, constructed by Access Innovations in 2012 and refined in collaboration with PLOS since then. PLOS ONE is an open access, peer-reviewed scientific journal published since 2006. It covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine.

Equivalence Relationships

By Melody Smith|October 28th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy, Term lists|Comments Off on Equivalence Relationships

Terms in an equivalence relationship refer to the same concept (or sometimes a roughly equivalent concept). They are usually synonyms. As has already been discussed, there should be only one “indexing term” or preferred term in your thesaurus for any given concept. You can and should include synonyms of those preferred terms in your thesaurus as synonyms. And the way to do that is with equivalence relationships. The synonyms that aren’t “preferred terms” are “non-preferred terms” in the same term record. Your taxonomy software instructions will indicate how to add non-preferred terms to term records; this action will establish an equivalence relationship between the preferred term and each non-preferred term.

Scope Notes and Editorial Notes in Taxonomies and Thesauri

By Melody Smith|October 21st, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Scope Notes and Editorial Notes in Taxonomies and Thesauri

Scope notes are another way to put a restriction on meaning. Scope notes are what you want to share with the world; editorial notes are what we will share with the team. A scope note might delineate the meaning itself. It might tell you the range of topics covered by the term; it might be instructions for use. We keep the term history in a separate field and we also keep the source in a separate field. Some thesauri will put all of that together in the Scope Notes field. Sometimes the Scope Notes need to be reciprocal. If they refer to another term, you need to post it in both places so that people can get to it.

Access Integrity Announces Debut of HCPCS Tagger Technology

By Melody Smith|October 21st, 2013|Access Insights, Autoindexing, News, semantic|Comments Off on Access Integrity Announces Debut of HCPCS Tagger Technology

The patented, rule-based application searches and analyzes the text in providers’ notes in electronic medical records to suggest highly relevant Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes for human review. Access Integrity CEO John Kuranz says the new technology will revolutionize the medical coding and billing industries.

The Zombies Are Coming

By Melody Smith|October 14th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on The Zombies Are Coming

Halloween is approaching fast, and unlike most zombies, we here at Access Innovations wanted to be sure we are ready for the hordes of zombies bound to be knocking down our doors on October 31st. Are you ready? If you’re not, never fear. We created a very unique tool to help you keep your head (pun intended) during the zombie apocalypse: a zombie taxonomy.

Data Harmony Users Group Meeting – “Then and Now: Addressing the Changing Needs of Content Development”

By Melody Smith|October 10th, 2013|Access Insights, News|Comments Off on Data Harmony Users Group Meeting – “Then and Now: Addressing the Changing Needs of Content Development”

Monday, February 10, is a full-day overview of the Data Harmony software suite. Attendees will learn how, why, and when taxonomies are used; how to start and maintain a taxonomy; and about resources available for taxonomy development. This information will provide a solid foundation for deeper understanding of the core meeting sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Bottom Up or Top Down?

By Melody Smith|October 7th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured|Comments Off on Bottom Up or Top Down?

Bottom up and top down are two opposite (but completely compatible) approaches to developing hierarchical structure. The controlled vocabulary standard ANSI/NISO Z39.19 explains the two approaches as follows:

Information Science Master Gone

By Melody Smith|October 3rd, 2013|Access Insights, News|Comments Off on Information Science Master Gone

This sad news was brought to our attention today and though we learned of it later than most, we couldn't let it go by without mentioning. Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster, 79, of Urbana, passed away on Sunday, August 25, 2013 in his home.

Types of Hierarchical Relationships

By Melody Smith|September 30th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy, Term lists|Comments Off on Types of Hierarchical Relationships

The defining characteristic of taxonomies is the presence of hierarchical relationships. Information specialists recognize several types of hierarchical relationships. Generic relationship – As explained in ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 (page 47), “This relationship identifies the link between a class and its members or species.” The generic relationship is generally called the Broader term/Narrower term relationship. In most cases, it’s easy in traditional biological taxonomy of organisms, because of its well-established and well-known groupings of phyla, genera, families, species, and so forth, i.e., Rodents and NT Squirrels.