Access Insights
Access Integrity Announces Debut of ICD Tagger Technology
Medical billing and coding just got a whole lot easier and more efficient with the release of ICD Tagger by Albuquerque-based Access Integrity.
Read MoreSome Thoughts on Vocabulary Control
A large part of what we work on in taxonomy development is vocabulary control. Our classification of knowledge involves designing controlled vocabularies and getting them into a form that we can use many, many times. We also have to do some linguistic analysis of the data to make sure that our terms are working correctly.
Read MoreM.A.I. (Machine-Aided Indexer) Selected as a KMWorld 2013 Trend-Setting Product of the Year
Access Innovations, Inc., leader in digital data organization and creator of the Data Harmony software suite, is proud to announce the inclusion of M.A.I.™ (Machine-Aided Indexer) in the KMWorld 2013 list of Trend-Setting Products. M.A.I. provides knowledge management solutions to organize information resources, based on a well-built and systematically applied taxonomy or thesaurus. The software…
Read MoreNatural Language Doesn’t Always Come Naturally
One of our goals in creating taxonomies and thesauri is to express the concepts in natural language. Natural language means that you have written it the way somebody would say it. We don’t invert it.
Read MoreTaxonomy is Gray
From the time of Plato, philosophers have been outlining the world as they saw it and they truly built an outline; they truly built a taxonomy of the world as they saw it. The way we perceive some field, or reality in general, is our own philosophy. If we look at the world through these lenses we see it one way; we look at the world through a different set of lenses, we see it absolutely differently. That is important to realize when building a thesaurus, because people are thinking of a field in one specific way or another.
Read MoreOutlining Slices of Knowledge
As most readers of this blog know, a thesaurus is a way to categorize the knowledge of certain fields or specified combinations thereof. All thesauri are built for specific fields or topical areas. This does not prevent a thesaurus from being able to cover a wide range of knowledge, especially if it’s multidisciplinary within, for instance, the area of academic subjects as a whole. (If the latter is the case, we might well have much more trouble with disambiguation than we would have in more specialized thesauri.)
Read MoreWhy Do We Need Taxonomies and Thesauri?
When an organization asks us to create a taxonomy or thesaurus, it’s usually because they want to be able to manage a collection.Taxonomies and thesauri are both types of controlled vocabularies. In controlled vocabularies intended for indexing, each concept covered by the vocabulary is represented by one and only one term that is valid for indexing. (True, a thesaurus contains synonyms, but in most computer-based thesauri, these take the form of “non-preferred” synonyms that point to the preferred terminology for the concept.) If the taxonomy or thesaurus is managed consistently, so they will get the same answers/results every time. They don’t want to get a different answer every time they do a search.
Read MoreData Harmony Users Group Call for Papers
The Tenth Annual Data Harmony® Users Group (DHUG) meeting will be held February 10-14, 2014 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You are cordially invited to join us for this milestone meeting.
Read MoreCreating a Beautiful Thesaurus
As a 35-year-old company, Access Innovations has produced more than 200 original thesauri, and we are currently working on more thesauri. Although there are standards for thesauri to kind of give us ground rules, we change and we do things differently depending on the needs of the client. The one rule that remains constant for us is this: A thesaurus must always reflect the collection that will be indexed with the thesaurus.
Read MoreIs Taxonomy the Oldest Profession?
I recently came across a reference to taxonomy as “the oldest profession”. Could it be? Intrigued, I g**gled and discovered that Dr. Joel Walker Hedgpeth had given an entire talk on the subject in 1961, as the Eleventh Annual University of the Pacific Faculty Research Lecture.
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