Access Insights
PLOS Celebrates Milestone
Public Library of Science (PLOS) is celebrating the publication of its 100,000th article, an achievement that represents the efforts of authors, editors, reviewers and staff from more than 200 countries. This exciting news was found on the PLOS site in their post titled, “PLOS Celebrates Milestone.”
Read MoreA Thousand Terms of Light
Last week, my co-workers and I were discussing points of knowledge. The phrase “a thousand terms of knowledge” popped up. It was apparently an off-the-cuff mingling of “a thousand points of light” with “points of knowledge” and with one of the topics of the moment, thesaurus terms. I couldn’t resist following up on the mixture, which has a precedent of sorts in an earlier TaxoDiary blog posting by Marjorie Hlava.
Read MoreAccess Innovations Celebrates 35th Anniversary
Albuquerque-based Access Innovations, a leader in semantic enrichment, celebrates its 35th anniversary this month.
Officially incorporated on November 8, 1978, Access Innovations began like many other entrepreneurial enterprises — with a great idea, a few energetic people, and a little bit of capital. The company’s first headquarters was the kitchen of president and co-founder Marjorie M.K. Hlava’s home.
Read MoreLearning Opportunities with the Access Staff
Several of the Access Innovations’ staff are still out and about as they wind up 2013. Check out these learning opportunities that just might be in your own neighborhood.
Read MoreLists Large and Small: Let Me Count the Ways
We taxonomists love lists. For us, they are raw materials, the stuff we love to get our hands on to start organizing. I recently came across a couple of lists with crossover appeal and relevance beyond simple conceptual organization. Both address why we do this stuff and how we help turn information into actionable knowledge.
Read MoreA Cloud Drifting Toward a Classification
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?
Read MoreAccess 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.
Read MoreEquivalence 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.
Read MoreScope 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.
Read MoreAccess 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.
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