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Why Do We Need Taxonomies and Thesauri?
When an organization asks us to create a taxonomy or thesaurus, it’s usually because they want to be able to manage a collection.Taxonomies and thesauri are both types of controlled vocabularies. In controlled vocabularies intended for indexing, each concept covered by the vocabulary is represented by one and only one term that is valid for indexing. (True, a thesaurus contains synonyms, but in most computer-based thesauri, these take the form of “non-preferred” synonyms that point to the preferred terminology for the concept.) If the taxonomy or thesaurus is managed consistently, so they will get the same answers/results every time. They don’t want to get a different answer every time they do a search.
Read MoreCreating a Beautiful Thesaurus
As a 35-year-old company, Access Innovations has produced more than 200 original thesauri, and we are currently working on more thesauri. Although there are standards for thesauri to kind of give us ground rules, we change and we do things differently depending on the needs of the client. The one rule that remains constant for us is this: A thesaurus must always reflect the collection that will be indexed with the thesaurus.
Read MoreIs Taxonomy the Oldest Profession?
I recently came across a reference to taxonomy as “the oldest profession”. Could it be? Intrigued, I g**gled and discovered that Dr. Joel Walker Hedgpeth had given an entire talk on the subject in 1961, as the Eleventh Annual University of the Pacific Faculty Research Lecture.
Read MoreThere’s Indexing and There’s Indexing: Report from the American Society for Indexing Conference
The American Society for Indexing may be a little known group to most reading a blog dedicated to taxonomy work. Yet we share a focus on making content accessible, albeit through different strategies. The American Society of Indexers (ASI) was established in 1968 to promote the work of back-of-book indexers and facilitate their interaction. In 2008 it was renamed to the American Society for Indexing with the stated purpose “to promote excellence in indexing, and to serve indexers and others concerned with indexing.” The name change reflected a broadening of scope, including taxonomy work and coinciding with the establishment of the Taxonomy SIG (special interest group). ASI’s training course even includes a taxonomy construction module. The expansion is a response to the mushrooming of electronic content and increasing need for simplifying access to online materials. Yet, for the society focused on “indexing,” taxonomic indexing is called tagging and has seemed an afterthought at best. Indeed, few database indexers attend conferences, and there is little mention of their activity.
Read MoreMarjorie M.K. Hlava’s Name Entered Into Congressional Record
Marjorie M.K. Hlava, President and Chairman of Access Innovations, Inc., has been entered into the Congressional Record by New Mexico Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham.
Read MoreJohn Kuranz Brings 30+ Years’ Expertise to Access Integrity
Access Innovations is proud to announce John Kuranz as chief executive officer of its newest endeavor, Access Integrity — which employs Access Innovations’ award-winning Data Harmony software suite to the medical coding and billing industries.
Read MoreOutlining the World (and Its Parts)
As we have seen, there were a lot of early philosophers who outlined the world as they saw it. While that’s an ambitious undertaking (especially for academic trailblazers), they truly built an outline; they truly built a taxonomy of the world as they saw it.
Read MoreThe Wonderful World of Search
Search is such a wonderful and widely debated issue. To me there are three main kinds of search and each is accomplished in different ways.
Assume that we have an article indexed with the terms appropriate to the content of that article. These terms are specific to the content, the terms applied are not broad categories unless the article itself is broad. we put limits in the rule base on broad terms so they do not get over productive in search results.
Read MoreAccess Innovations Teams with Public Library of Science (PLOS) to Enhance Depth and Breadth of Information Retrieval
Albuquerque, NM — Access Innovations, a leading firm in information retrieval, has teamed with the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a non-profit multi-disciplinary publisher and advocacy organization, to create a customized thesaurus to enhance search retrieval. The new, NISO Z39.19-compliant thesaurus includes more than 10,000 terms and 3,300 synonyms, which will enhance search retrieval tenfold.…
Read MorePoints of Knowledge
To deal with a large body of knowledge, we need to localize and organize it somehow. Where that knowledge is located, or where and how it is organized, or the system by which it is identified and perhaps indexed, might be called the points of knowledge. And certainly, databases connected to and/or indexed with knowledge organization systems represent points of knowledge.
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