Taxodiary – Access Insights

Taxonomy and Search: Access Innovations’ Founder And Industry Pioneer Talks About Three Important Trends

By Melody Smith|July 19th, 2011|Access Insights, News, search, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Taxonomy and Search: Access Innovations’ Founder And Industry Pioneer Talks About Three Important Trends

During her 33 years in the search industry, Margie Hlava, president of Access Innovations, has seen a lot of trends come and go. Today’s changing information environment, with its ever-growing avalanche of data and critical need for better search and more efficient organization of content, presents some unique challenges. Hlava recently shared her views with Steve Arnold, a technology and financial analyst who has more than 30 years of experience, as part of his Search Wizards Speak series. Access Innovations, Hlava’s company, is releasing an excerpt of the interview.

From Taxonomy to Thesaurus

By Melody Smith|July 18th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|1 Comment

Nowadays, taxonomy and thesaurus often are used interchangeably. Indeed, we can consider a hierarchical thesaurus (which most are these days) as a fancy taxonomy. In either case, we use the controlled vocabulary for the indexing and retrieval. The hierarchical array is for our convenience for either navigating the collection when we are searching or for organizing the terms.

Connecting Taxonomies

By Melody Smith|July 11th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Connecting Taxonomies

I’ve been asked if taxonomies can be connected. The thinking was, if these taxonomies are standardized, or at least mostly standardized, it seems that there should be a way that taxonomies can be connected in various organizational systems.

Interdisciplinary Taxonomies

By Melody Smith|July 4th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Interdisciplinary Taxonomies

People need to decide when they are building their taxonomy if they have one point of origin or if they are interdisciplinary. Some firms start with a one-point path; it is that path and that path alone that drives the firm. They have a single point of origin. They will need to clearly state term relationships, which is not always done.

Uses for a Thesaurus

By Melody Smith|June 27th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, indexing, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Uses for a Thesaurus

A thesaurus can be used for several different purposes. It is mainly used for information retrieval, in one way or another. We use it in information retrieval both on the search end and in the tagging of the records.

From Simple to Complex

By Melody Smith|June 20th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, ontology, Standards, Taxonomy, Term lists|Comments Off on From Simple to Complex

People talk about different kinds of vocabularies. The differences usually have to do with the structure, or lack thereof. Sometimes, people refer to “flat lists”. These are one-level lists with no hierarchical structure. They can be uncontrolled or controlled lists. An uncontrolled list is a simple, flat structure. The uncontrolled list is your “Saturday list”.

Pre or Post-Coordinate Indexing?

By Melody Smith|June 13th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, indexing, Term lists|1 Comment

Most people think about what they want to search for and are willing to combine their concepts at the time of search. If you think of the way people search in Google, they put in the combination of terms they are thinking of; they are doing the coordination of terms. It is up to the search software to do the intersection of the terms for them and figure out the post-coordination.

Breaking Down Automatic Metadata Generation/Extraction

By Melody Smith|June 6th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, indexing, metadata, semantic, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Breaking Down Automatic Metadata Generation/Extraction

There are two approaches to automatic metadata generation/extraction and within those, many variations. Generally speaking, the statistical approach types are Bayesian, vector, neural nets, automatic clustering, and the like. These methods work off the principle that if in a big set of data two words occur together frequently, then those words are related conceptually.atistical methods depend on the algorithms that the developer has come up with. Some vendors lock down the numerical recipes and provide few or no user controls. These systems usually require “training”. The way that they do this is to take a list of terms, often a thesaurus, taxonomy or authority file and a corpus of text. The system manager processes the inputs with spot checking and often manual intervention by a human subject matter expert. When the system has been trained, test queries are run to verify that the system is performing as desired on fresh content.

Search as Big Brother, Molding What You See and Think

By Melody Smith|May 30th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, search, Taxonomy|3 Comments

A recent TED presentation is by Eli Pariser. He is the author of “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You.” A new and very interesting book. His talk is a synopsis of how the Google personalization algorithms effect search results. Google results are influenced by your own search history and other online activity. Any system such as Amazon, Yahoo, Bing ebay shopping systems depend heavily on personalization to serve you results. Traditional databases do not use profiles (yet) but they are often based on Verity, Vivisimo, Autonomy, Fast and other mathematically based search software so they could and they do serve up different results whenever the vectors are reset - that is every time additional data is added to the system with updates or metadata enrichment.

Health Care Logistics Chooses Metalogix for SharePoint Migration

By Melody Smith|May 25th, 2011|Access Insights, metadata, News|Comments Off on Health Care Logistics Chooses Metalogix for SharePoint Migration

Health Care Logistics has purchased Metalogix Migration Manager for SharePoint to migrate from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2010. This opposed to using Microsoft tools, which would have taken much longer for the migration.