The trip was awesome—a dream exotic vacation to Bali. It was not about eat, pray, love, but a rather unbalanced midpoint to meet my Oz-dwelling daughter. I enjoyed dashes of ecotourism and agritourism, but even in full vacation mode I couldn’t fully suppress my perspective as a taxonomist.
The recent MarkLogic User Conference was a watershed event for the publishers in attendance, many of whom are just beginning to strategize about the application of semantic technology to their content. After years of hearing “the Semantic Web is coming,” the message this time was that it’s no longer about “what” or “why,” but “how” publishers will leverage this technology. It has been 10 years since Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, and Ora Lassila announced the creation of the Semantic Web, so many of us were very excited to hear Jim Hendler’s update on current developments. Some key themes of his presentation were already covered in this article from August, 2010 in New Scientist: Google, Twitter, and Facebook Build the Semantic Web. With his trademark slogan, “A little semantics goes a long way,” Hendler added some further context, and described how these companies and others have tapped into social and commercial drivers to promote relatively simple approaches to solving the problem of getting content tagged, and thus increasing the ability for computers to understand the meaning of text across vast amounts of Web content.
The Autonomy folks must be getting worried about the progress of taxonomy applications and the precision and recall that such systems provide. Autonomy and Google live on relevance rankings as the return to the user. Relevance to me is a confidence game. It is the best guess of the system as to whether the results returned will actually match the user's request. If you have a big enough data set returned, certainly something in there will be useful. But the sheer amount of items the user has to review (or amount of noise they have to look at) is very annoying. So they rank the returns by relevance based on a number of statistical factors so the most likely items based on co-occurrence with terms matches and near matches will appear at the top of the list - that is, they will be relevance ranked.
The first new Taxobank entry in quite some time is the Pasta Lover's Thesaurus, apparently a student project but nevertheless an informative and mouth-watering example of a straightforward hierarchical and relational thesaurus.
Tech companies come and go. There are always tech savvy entrepreneurs with big ideas looking to fill a need in the market and investors looking to get the huge returns that only come from investing in tech startups.
Online reputation management is a constant topic in today’s social media world. How you use your resources and time searching social media platforms will directly affect the results you get. One author takes the time to review various tools available to monitor your organization’s online reputation.
The Wall Street Journal on April 19, 2011 talked about the need for customer name authority control in banks. Okay, so maybe that is not what they said. What they did outline was the problem Arabic names and the many ways to state them gives to banks and other organizations which try to track the information or put a hold on funds for organizations like the example, Moammar Gadhafi. Also know as many other names. His first name could be transliterated as Muammar, Mummar, Mohamed Mahmut, Mehmud and more than 20 other variants. The same goes last name could be Gaddafi, Ghathafi, Elkaddafi, El-Kaddafi, Al-Gaddafi, Gadhafi, Qaddafi, Al-Qadhafi, El-Qaddfi, Qadhafi, Abu Miryar Al-Qahafi, Ghadaffi, and others. Any combination of these names is valid. There are further complications of the Abu or Al or El and other designations of honor make things even more interesting.
I went to the doctor’s office this week and they asked if I would participate in a short Federal survey. I said sure. What followed was beyond frustrating.