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Leveraging Your Taxonomy – Part 6

By Melody Smith | March 12, 2012

This is the next piece in our series of blog posts on search and how it works. Last week we ended with natural language processing and we are picking up this week on automatic language processing or ALP.

Leveraging Your Taxonomy – Part 5

By Melody Smith | March 5, 2012

This is the next piece in our series of blog posts on search and how it works This time we are talking about the importance of relevancy. Relevance is how well a set of returned documents answers the information need, another way of talking about accuracy. But, it’s related to the objective of the search so different user communities can get exactly the same answer from a set of information resources and one will find the set relevant and the other will not. So, there’s a really healthy tension between the user needs and the context available. That’s why a lot of relevance engines do a lot of profiling of the users so that, if I search Google for a particular question, I might get one answer and each of you will search it and get a different answer. That’s because your profile and the things that you’ve clicked on in the past will indicate to Google that your answers should be more in this sphere or more in that sphere. So, relevance is really a confidence factor or a guesstimate on how well this set of documents will answer this particular user’s query.

Leveraging Your Taxonomy – Part 4

By Melody Smith | February 27, 2012

As we continue this series on search and how it works, we have to address accuracy. First, how are we are going to measure accuracy?

Leveraging Your Taxonomy – Part 3

By Melody Smith | February 20, 2012

This series of blog posts is exploring how search works. We need to have a basic understanding of search fundamentals in order to know where taxonomies come in. Last week we started talking about search software and today we will continue with that topic. I believe in the data first as you know. Staring in the diagram with your Source Data you can see how the data flows. You need to clean the source data to a uniform format. This is often called the conversion process or the ETL – Extract Transform and Load.

Leveraging Your Taxonomy – Part 2

By Melody Smith | February 13, 2012

This series of blog posts is exploring how search works. We need to have a basic understanding of search fundamentals in order to know where taxonomies come in. Last week we started with the various modules of search. This week we are addressing the search software itself.

Leveraging Your Taxonomy – Part 1

By Melody Smith | February 6, 2012

This series of blog posts will explore how search works. We need to have a basic understanding of search fundamentals in order to know where taxonomies come in.

Of Taxonomies, Biology, and Moneyball

By Melody Smith | January 30, 2012

Baseball and biology are not commonly found in the same conceptual space. Neither do you find taxonomy associated with baseball, but in recent news these connections were made. Grant Bisbee, Editor, “Baseball Nation”, digresses into the arcane as he laments the coming of the “He’s In the Best Shape of His Life” season. This is the time of year baseball writers must assess the prospects for the coming season and clichés and hyperbole rein. The dubious practice of evaluating the physical condition of players runs rampant as spring training begins. With tongue in cheek Bisbee tries to shape a taxonomy to classify this spring ritual. His would be the taxonomy of the “In the Best-shape Stories”.

Eighth Annual Data Harmony Users Group – February 7-9, 2012

By Melody Smith | January 23, 2012

Access Innovations will host the the eighth annual Data Harmony® Users Group (DHUG) meeting this coming February 7-9 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The meeting will focus on helping users get the most from their investment in the Data Harmony knowledge management software suite, which helps users organize information resources based on a well-built and systematically applied taxonomy or thesaurus.

2012: What Lies Ahead?

By Melody Smith | January 16, 2012

This time of year I read a lot of trends and reviews. What happened last year and what will happen in the coming year is a popular topic and it is in fact a good time to take stock and think about initiatives for the year ahead. So here is what I see coming down the road for 2012.

Taxonomy Meetings 2011 – A Year of Change or Realization?

By Melody Smith | January 9, 2012 |

What are the meetings that cater to people who use controlled vocabularies, like taxonomies? Where should a taxonomist go, click, or attend to learn about the latest implementations and uses of controlled vocabulary strategies? Every company thinks long and hard both about what they do and where to find customers for their products and services. The Information Industry is no different. In the Age of the Internet when everyone’s “knows” about searching and information; it seems like the “information Industry” should be booming, its conferences should be huge, and the attendance incredible, but that is not the case. Why? If the information industry and our little taxonomy segment of the business has gone mainstream, then where are all the people you would expect at the long established industry meetings?