Access Innovations will host the the eighth annual Data Harmony® Users Group (DHUG) meeting this coming February 7-9 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The meeting will focus on helping users get the most from their investment in the Data Harmony knowledge management software suite, which helps users organize information resources based on a well-built and systematically applied taxonomy or thesaurus.
This time of year I read a lot of trends and reviews. What happened last year and what will happen in the coming year is a popular topic and it is in fact a good time to take stock and think about initiatives for the year ahead. So here is what I see coming down the road for 2012.
The Eighth Annual Data Harmony® Users Group (DHUG) meeting, scheduled Feb. 7-9, 2012 in Albuquerque, New Mexico will focus on helping users get the most from their investment in the knowledge management software suite, which helps users organize information resources based on a well-built and systematically applied taxonomy or thesaurus.
What are the meetings that cater to people who use controlled vocabularies, like taxonomies? Where should a taxonomist go, click, or attend to learn about the latest implementations and uses of controlled vocabulary strategies? Every company thinks long and hard both about what they do and where to find customers for their products and services. The Information Industry is no different. In the Age of the Internet when everyone’s “knows” about searching and information; it seems like the “information Industry” should be booming, its conferences should be huge, and the attendance incredible, but that is not the case. Why? If the information industry and our little taxonomy segment of the business has gone mainstream, then where are all the people you would expect at the long established industry meetings?
Sharepoint is a popular software and comes free with the MicroSoft Server. In fact, I think Sharepoint, more than any other thing, has excited interest in taxonomies for people. Sharepoint 2010 has a taxonomy module and although it doesn’t have everything that your heart might wish for, it is a significant step forward. A lot of people have been trying to figure out exactly how to best use their taxonomy within the Sharepoint offering. This is one option.
A completely different kind of use is term analytics. We have talked a lot of text analytics in the past, where people take great big full text files and they run them through a lot of Bayesian, neural net, and latent semantic indexing kind of engines to figure out how to compare things. You could do that using a taxonomy instead and still figure out the strengths of the organization; what are the strengths in the publications; what are the emerging topics in your areas. You use people’s own data to address these questions and figure out the answers.
Continuing with our series on semantic integration, let's discuss Authors. You can take a list of authors by place. Identifying marks or spots represent clusters of people who have published on a particular topical area. You take the author, their subject profile, and then attach to their address, the latitude and longitude of that address, and you can put them on a map. These kinds of match-ups are pretty cool.
As we continue talking about semantic integration and more specifically, use cases; here is a different kind of use case. Somebody in this case is uploading an article (and you’ll see this again in other venues) in this case a conference paper to the American Society for Information Science and Technology site. A prospective author uploads their paper, they fill in the blanks as appropriate, and up pops a list of appropriate taxonomy terms. The author, the submitting person, can then check off the list of terms they think are appropriate to their paper. Then the paper is saved, already indexed. They will have already indexed their paper, which saves people a lot of time. In any kind of venue, folks can do their own indexing.
Continuing with the SLA Taxonomy Division’s webinar series, the next webinar is titled “Taxonomies for Publishing: Enhancing the User Experience” and will be held Wednesday, December 14th at 1:00 p.m. EST (10:00 a.m. PST).
Last week, we started discussing semantic integration. We did a brief introduction and now that the basics are settled let us look at ways to enrich the user experience using Semantics (the words from our taxonomies). We have a way to improve search. It is a search option driven by taxonomies that you can play with.