Taxodiary – Access Insights

Theory of Knowledge: 18th Century Developments

By Melody Smith|April 22nd, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Theory of Knowledge: 18th Century Developments

Last time, we mentioned biological taxonomy. This leads us inevitably to Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swedish zoologist and botanist. We regard him as the “father of modern taxonomy." Contrary to popular belief, Linnaeus did not invent the binomial nomenclature system, with organism types designated by genus and species. That honor belongs to the Bauhin brothers, Gaspar (1560-1624) and Johann (1541-1613). The two Swiss brothers formalized the then-existing method of (often vague and wordy) polynomial nomenclature, introducing a stricter, more logical system with one word for the genus and one for the species.

Theory of Knowledge: The Age of Enlightenment

By Melody Smith|April 15th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured|Comments Off on Theory of Knowledge: The Age of Enlightenment

The 17th century ushered in some new ways of thinking about knowledge. One of the 17th-century philosophers who studied the nature of knowledge (among many other things) was René Descartes (1596-1650), who concerned himself with the nature of knowledge (among many other things).

Theory of Knowledge: Philosophic Beginnings

By Melody Smith|April 8th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Theory of Knowledge: Philosophic Beginnings

At their core, taxonomies and other classification systems are ways of organizing and managing knowledge. To understand the history of classification systems, it behooves us to explore the history of thinking about knowledge. So what is knowledge? The Greek philosopher Plato defined it as “justified true belief”. However, the twentieth-century writer Bertrand Russell commented that “at first sight it might be thought that knowledge might be defined as belief which is in agreement with the facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true.”

In Memory of Dr. Peter Noerr

By Melody Smith|March 22nd, 2013|Access Insights, News|Comments Off on In Memory of Dr. Peter Noerr

Dr. Peter Noerr was a towering intellectual force in the backrooms of the information industry. Quiet, infinitely curious, he created two systems and helped with many more. In his early days in South Africa he automated mining operations. Later he moved to Sweden and then to the UK. He created the TinLib system for IME. After selling that company he became MuseGlobal's founder a federated search and retrieval system which operates as middle ware in many of the systems we use today.

Access Innovations, Inc. Teams with AIP Publishing LLC to Create Disambiguation Program for Author Authority File

By Melody Smith|March 18th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured|Comments Off on Access Innovations, Inc. Teams with AIP Publishing LLC to Create Disambiguation Program for Author Authority File

Access Innovations, a leading data management firm, has partnered with AIP Publishing LLC, one of the world’s largest physical science publishers, to produce a comprehensive list of about 980,000 discrete academic authors and 33,000 institutions involved in publishing physics papers worldwide. Dating back to the early 20th century, the complete dataset contains more than 800,000 articles.

Access Innovations named to KMWorld’s annual 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management

By Melody Smith|March 11th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured|Comments Off on Access Innovations named to KMWorld’s annual 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management

Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in digital data organization, announces its inclusion on KMWorld’s annual list of the Top 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management. Access Innovations is featured for its second year, after debuting on the list in 2005. Other notable companies given a spot on the 2013 top 100 list include Adobe, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

A Quick Look Behind the Scenes

By Melody Smith|March 4th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on A Quick Look Behind the Scenes

The workings of a taxonomy or thesaurus in a database or website can seem mysterious. Let’s take a look behind the scenes. irst of all, we need the taxonomy or thesaurus in digital form, either as a separate file or as it exists in a specialized software application. The screenshot below is from the editorial user interface of a thesaurus software application.

Where Do Terms Go?

By admin|February 25th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Where Do Terms Go?

Over the past several weeks, we have looked at various topics involving taxonomies and thesauri. And we have seen that controlled vocabularies are an important part of search and browsing. But how are taxonomies put to use? What about the terms? Where do they go? Exactly how are they put to use in search? What are the different ways that a taxonomy can be used in search?

Taxonomies Are Everywhere

By Melody Smith|February 25th, 2013|Access Insights, News, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Taxonomies Are Everywhere

here are taxonomies everywhere. Walk into Home Depot or your nearest grocery store and look up. The aisle markers tell you where to find what you are looking for -- in broad terms and hopefully, related terms.

Best Practices Shared at DHUG

By Melody Smith|February 22nd, 2013|Access Insights, News|Comments Off on Best Practices Shared at DHUG

Building a thesaurus for a digital library of more than 1,500 academic journals, 15,000 scholarly books and other sources, is no easy task. Currently there is no one single thesaurus that holds the terms to cover all the subjects included in these collections. Nancy Murray, Associate Director, Metadata for JSTOR is taking on that challenge with the assistance of Access Innovations and Data Harmony.