Classifying Exoplanets: Where does Earth 2.0 fall?

On the 9th of January, 1992, astronomers around the world rejoiced. For the first time ever, they had definitive proof of a planet orbiting another star. These early observations were extremely limited, mainly focused on noticing the wobble of the parent star, but they opened the proverbial floodgate for exoplanet discovery. A little over two…

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Registration Now Open for the 12th Annual Data Harmony Users Group Meeting

Registration is now open for the twelfth annual Data Harmony Users Group (DHUG) meeting, scheduled for February 9-10, 2016 at the Access Innovations, Inc. offices located at 4725 Indian School Road NE, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Access Innovations, the company behind the Data Harmony product line, hosts the annual meeting. Case studies presented by Data…

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Everything Goes Every Place It Fits

The traditional taxonomy is monohierarchical – there is one and only one place for every term. This is only sensible for many purposes; no one wants to look up a book in a library catalog only to find out that it is either in Section A or Section F, and no biologist would ever identify…

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The Thesaurus as a Domain Model in the Modern World

Source: Dreamstime Nowadays, taxonomies and thesauri are used largely for web navigation and for information search and retrieval. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, it’s largely the digital information revolution that has made their use for information search and retrieval a vital necessity in research, business, and numerous other types of activities. Taxonomies and…

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Smart Thesauri: Using Taxonomies with Linked Data

Note: A full version of this article is scheduled to be published in an upcoming issue of the IKO eNewsletter. As interest in Linked Data (LD) continues to grow, many organizations—publishers, corporations, universities, libraries—are increasingly interested in strategies to jump-start LD initiatives. Any organization that has an existing taxonomy (or other controlled vocabulary) can expedite…

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ICD-10 and Taxonomies

In Canada, the implementation of ICD-10 caused an approximate 50% drop in productivity in rates of coding in the health profession. Reports show that a year after implementation, productivity only returned to 80% of the original ICD-9 baseline. Now, more than a decade since Canada adopted the new coding system, they still have yet to…

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TaxoDiary Blog Achieves Milestones in Sharing Information

The TaxoDiary blog, which can be read at www.taxodiary.com and adds new posts on a daily basis every Monday through Friday, recently published its 3,000th blog post. TaxoDiary was started in August 2010 and is sponsored and maintained by Access Innovations, Inc., under the leadership of Access Innovations President Marjorie Hlava and Chief Executive Officer Jay…

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Father of Library Science

Father’s Day is coming up soon, so we thought we’d pay homage to Shiyali Ramamrita (S. R.) Ranganathan. As described in the Wikipedia article about him, Ranganathan “is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental…

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Down the Rabbit Hole

As many readers know, the main U.S. standard for taxonomies, thesauri, and other controlled vocabularies is ANSI/NISO Z39.19, Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. The material on vocabulary displays covers types of vocabulary displays that might be unfamiliar. I’m guessing that some of these displays emerged as the result of…

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