Featured – Page 76

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?

SharePoint and Taxonomies – Part VI of VI

By Melody Smith | January 2, 2012

Sharepoint is a popular software and comes free with the MicroSoft Server. In fact, I think Sharepoint, more than any other thing, has excited interest in taxonomies for people. Sharepoint 2010 has a taxonomy module and although it doesn’t have everything that your heart might wish for, it is a significant step forward. A lot of people have been trying to figure out exactly how to best use their taxonomy within the Sharepoint offering. This is one option.

Data Visualization and Term Analytics – Part V of VI

By Melody Smith | December 26, 2011

A completely different kind of use is term analytics. We have talked a lot of text analytics in the past, where people take great big full text files and they run them through a lot of Bayesian, neural net, and latent semantic indexing kind of engines to figure out how to compare things. You could do that using a taxonomy instead and still figure out the strengths of the organization; what are the strengths in the publications; what are the emerging topics in your areas. You use people’s own data to address these questions and figure out the answers.

Authors at a Place – Part IV of VI

By Melody Smith | December 19, 2011

Continuing with our series on semantic integration, let’s discuss Authors.

You can take a list of authors by place. Identifying marks or spots represent clusters of people who have published on a particular topical area. You take the author, their subject profile, and then attach to their address, the latitude and longitude of that address, and you can put them on a map. These kinds of match-ups are pretty cool.

Paper Submission – Empowering the Authors – Part III of VI

By Melody Smith | December 12, 2011

As we continue talking about semantic integration and more specifically, use cases; here is a different kind of use case. Somebody in this case is uploading an article (and you’ll see this again in other venues) in this case a conference paper to the American Society for Information Science and Technology site. A prospective author uploads their paper, they fill in the blanks as appropriate, and up pops a list of appropriate taxonomy terms. The author, the submitting person, can then check off the list of terms they think are appropriate to their paper. Then the paper is saved, already indexed. They will have already indexed their paper, which saves people a lot of time. In any kind of venue, folks can do their own indexing.

Use Cases for Semantic Enrichment Using Taxonomies – Part II of VI

By Melody Smith | December 5, 2011

Last week, we started discussing semantic integration. We did a brief introduction and now that the basics are settled let us look at ways to enrich the user experience using Semantics (the words from our taxonomies). We have a way to improve search. It is a search option driven by taxonomies that you can play with.

Semantic Integration – Part I of VI

By Melody Smith | November 28, 2011

To discuss the semantic integration or the leveraging of a taxonomy in search, web sites mashups and other places, we should first review what they are. Let’s look at the definitions and then the integration of a taxonomy as a building block for the larger information architecture for an organization. We need to think of taxonomies in that bigger case when we are talking about where we apply them. Once those are out of the way I will review some use-cases and show what makes them work.