Taxodiary – Access Insights

The Impact of Apple

By Melody Smith|October 10th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Technology|Comments Off on The Impact of Apple

The passing of Steve Jobs gives us a chance to reflect on the business in general and, of course, how it affects us. The many incredible things he did and his inventions are very well covered in other more appropriate venues. The world changed significantly on his watch and he drove others to make amazing strides. We always admired the Apple systems and in fact were the first commercial installation of Apple IIe's in (at least in New Mexico) 1980. We bought 22 of the 48K main memory machines with single sided floppy 5.25 inch drives holding 512 K of data at one time. We had one machine with two floppy drives where we would copy the data for safe back up before transferring it to 9 track 1600 bpi tape on the Wang system for eventual conversion and delivery to the clients.

Naïveté? Hardly.

By Melody Smith|October 3rd, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Naïveté? Hardly.

Is it really naïve to think two complimentary domains can be described by taxonomies and then mapped? Authors Robert L. Glass and Iris Vessey, in a recent Viewpoints column in IEEE Software published by the IEEE Computer Society, titled, “Naïveté Squared: In Search of Two Taxonomies and a Mapping Between Them” concluded they were naïve. The authors have long thought, there needs to be “a taxonomy of application domains; a taxonomy of solution approaches; and a mapping between the two.” They feel they were naïve because, despite promoting the need for several decades, it hasn’t happened. Or so they think.

Open Net – What a site!

By Melody Smith|September 26th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Term lists|1 Comment

I was doing some poking around to find out about OpenNet (which the Department of State uses), and I came across a DOE implementation of it (they apparently helped invent it.) Clicking the author link works really well! The site is clean and crisp. Very professional looking.

Natural Language Processing Only Goes So Far

By Melody Smith|September 19th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, search, semantic|1 Comment

The sirens call of natural language processing has been issued again. In this study, the researchers compared the use for free text searches to administrative codes to see which would give better indication of safety based on 20 indicators. The authors rightly suggest that instead of relying only on the notoriously poor check boxes used with discharge orders that the hand written notes form the discharge nurse or physician might be much more instructive.

Finding New Among the Old

By Melody Smith|September 15th, 2011|Access Insights, indexing, News, Term lists|Comments Off on Finding New Among the Old

Indexing is becoming one of the key information management methods. That is not new news. The fascination of categorizing and putting vast information in a findable form is what drives good taxonomy building.

Large Data Sets and Ever Changing Terminology

By Melody Smith|September 12th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, indexing|1 Comment

Indexing enables accurate, consistent retrieval to the full depth and breadth of the collection. This does not mean that the statistics-based systems the government loves so much, will go away but, they are learning to embrace the addition of taxonomy terms as indexing.

ICD-10 System Has 5x the Codes

By Melody Smith|September 12th, 2011|Access Insights, Autoindexing, indexing, News, Taxonomy|1 Comment

3M, the designers of the ICD-10 Procedure Coding System, will help the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) prep its computer systems for ICD-10 coding.

Solving Information Puzzles

By Melody Smith|September 8th, 2011|Access Insights, indexing, News|Comments Off on Solving Information Puzzles

All the talk is about big data, but what about changing data? If a knowledge domain doesn’t change, it becomes stagnant. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls are changing as more and more is discovered about them by different scientists and researchers. Change was the topic recently when, Access Innovations’ president, Margie Hlava, sat down with Steve Arnold, a technology and financial analyst, owner of ArnoldIT and writer of Beyond Search.

Font Awareness

By Melody Smith|September 5th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Text processing|2 Comments

Shelf Awareness is a Web-based resource for readers and those in the book trade. It was brought my attention by Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness’s book review editor. (Full disclosure, Marilyn is my cousin.) I bring this wonderful resource to your attention for a variety of reasons not the least of which is their free email newsletter service for readers and one for professionals in the book trade. Twice a week I get an email containing reviews of a wide variety of new, recent, and sometimes classic, fiction and nonfiction works.

Changing Search Into Found

By Melody Smith|September 1st, 2011|Access Insights, indexing, News, search|Comments Off on Changing Search Into Found

With the volume of data doubling every four to six months, findability within that data has never been more important. Many are looking to indexing as the solution to this problem.