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Access Innovations’ Taxonomy Client Public Library of Science (PLOS) Unveils PLOS ONE Platform
PLOS ONE unveiled its new e-journal platform last month, with Subject Area browsing capability made possible by the PLOS thesaurus, constructed by Access Innovations in 2012 and refined in collaboration with PLOS since then. PLOS ONE is an open access, peer-reviewed scientific journal published since 2006. It covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine.
Read MoreEquivalence Relationships
Terms in an equivalence relationship refer to the same concept (or sometimes a roughly equivalent concept). They are usually synonyms. As has already been discussed, there should be only one “indexing term” or preferred term in your thesaurus for any given concept. You can and should include synonyms of those preferred terms in your thesaurus as synonyms. And the way to do that is with equivalence relationships. The synonyms that aren’t “preferred terms” are “non-preferred terms” in the same term record. Your taxonomy software instructions will indicate how to add non-preferred terms to term records; this action will establish an equivalence relationship between the preferred term and each non-preferred term.
Read MoreScope Notes and Editorial Notes in Taxonomies and Thesauri
Scope notes are another way to put a restriction on meaning. Scope notes are what you want to share with the world; editorial notes are what we will share with the team. A scope note might delineate the meaning itself. It might tell you the range of topics covered by the term; it might be instructions for use. We keep the term history in a separate field and we also keep the source in a separate field. Some thesauri will put all of that together in the Scope Notes field. Sometimes the Scope Notes need to be reciprocal. If they refer to another term, you need to post it in both places so that people can get to it.
Read MoreThe Zombies Are Coming
Halloween is approaching fast, and unlike most zombies, we here at Access Innovations wanted to be sure we are ready for the hordes of zombies bound to be knocking down our doors on October 31st. Are you ready? If you’re not, never fear. We created a very unique tool to help you keep your head (pun intended) during the zombie apocalypse: a zombie taxonomy.
Read MoreBottom Up or Top Down?
Bottom up and top down are two opposite (but completely compatible) approaches to developing hierarchical structure. The controlled vocabulary standard ANSI/NISO Z39.19 explains the two approaches as follows:
Read MoreTypes of Hierarchical Relationships
The defining characteristic of taxonomies is the presence of hierarchical relationships. Information specialists recognize several types of hierarchical relationships. Generic relationship – As explained in ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 (page 47), “This relationship identifies the link between a class and its members or species.” The generic relationship is generally called the Broader term/Narrower term relationship. In most cases, it’s easy in traditional biological taxonomy of organisms, because of its well-established and well-known groupings of phyla, genera, families, species, and so forth, i.e., Rodents and NT Squirrels.
Read MoreKeeping Things Clear
In a controlled vocabulary, we strive for disambiguation, the restriction and clarification of meaning. We want to determine and clarify what exactly is meant by each term. Reading could mean a town in England or it could be a communication process. We might have the word ‘cells’, meaning biological microsystems or electrical equipment or prison housing or other things. You can have a terrorist cell. Cell is a broadly used term, and without some kind of a modifier around it, we can’t be sure what it is exactly.
Read MoreAccess Innovations Improves Indexing Accuracy of the CDC’s Mining Safety and Health Thesaurus
Access Innovations, Inc. is pleased to announce the completion of an automatic semantic tagging rulebase for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Mining Safety and Health Thesaurus (MSHT). The new, state-of-the-art system increases indexing accuracy to 93 percent and provides greater access to the mining safety and health database, thereby aiding researchers and statisticians in improving safety for the mining industry.
Read MoreTerms and Style
Taxonomists like to view a vocabulary as a literary work, which is more artistic when the style is consistent and cohesive. Consistency – which leads to predictability when searching or browsing – also makes it easier to avoid unintentional inclusion of multiple preferred terms for a single concept.
Read MoreSome Thoughts on Vocabulary Control
A large part of what we work on in taxonomy development is vocabulary control. Our classification of knowledge involves designing controlled vocabularies and getting them into a form that we can use many, many times. We also have to do some linguistic analysis of the data to make sure that our terms are working correctly.
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