Five Myths about Taxonomy and SharePoint

A couple of weeks ago there was a blog post, or repost by Jeff Carr, on the Early Site. I enjoyed reading it, and of course I have a few thoughts and places where I do not exactly agree. Let me take them on this week. There are 5 Myths. I will write about each of them separately.

Myth #1: SharePoint now has taxonomy management.

Read More

When will it be finished?

Is it final? Finally! I recall Rex Harrison playing Pope Julius II, shouting up to Charlton Heston as Michelangelo, something like, “When will it be finished?” To which Michelangelo-Heston replied enigmatically, “When I’m done!” Michelangelo spent most of five years (1477 to 1480) on his back painting the Sistine Chapel. The Pope’s impatience was not without justification as he was financing the project while trying to recapture former Papal territories filched by the Borgias.

Read More

What’s in a name?

Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

True, but try finding the right document set for your current project by sniffing them out from within a database of 8 million similar smelling documents. This approach is all too common, very time consuming, and unreliable leaving you with aromatic, unpalatable results.

Read More

ASIST in the Big Easy

The ASIST meeting was held in the delightful city of New Orleans this fall. The format, as well as the dates for the meeting was quite different this year and I found it refreshing. This is usually a heavily academic meeting and I go to keep my ears open to the research and trends that the Information Science and Library Schools are talking about. Every now and then there is a nugget I can use to enhance our products and services.

Read More

Semantic Risks

In a recent issue focusing on risk one article in Bloomberg Businessweek made the statement, “Such semantics may feel like distinctions without a difference. For underwriters in the specialty market of political-violence insurance, though, they’re crucial.” The semantic distinctions had to do with the labeling of political “protests” in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. I put “protests” in quotes to draw attention to the issue of semantics and its impact on insurance and risk assessment.

Read More

The Impact of Apple

The passing of Steve Jobs gives us a chance to reflect on the business in general and, of course, how it affects us. The many incredible things he did and his inventions are very well covered in other more appropriate venues. The world changed significantly on his watch and he drove others to make amazing strides. We always admired the Apple systems and in fact were the first commercial installation of Apple IIe’s in (at least in New Mexico) 1980. We bought 22 of the 48K main memory machines with single sided floppy 5.25 inch drives holding 512 K of data at one time. We had one machine with two floppy drives where we would copy the data for safe back up before transferring it to 9 track 1600 bpi tape on the Wang system for eventual conversion and delivery to the clients.

Read More

Naïveté? Hardly.

Is it really naïve to think two complimentary domains can be described by taxonomies and then mapped? Authors Robert L. Glass and Iris Vessey, in a recent Viewpoints column in IEEE Software published by the IEEE Computer Society, titled, “Naïveté Squared: In Search of Two Taxonomies and a Mapping Between Them” concluded they were naïve. The authors have long thought, there needs to be “a taxonomy of application domains; a taxonomy of solution approaches; and a mapping between the two.” They feel they were naïve because, despite promoting the need for several decades, it hasn’t happened. Or so they think.

Read More

Open Net – What a site!

I was doing some poking around to find out about OpenNet (which the Department of State uses), and I came across a DOE implementation of it (they apparently helped invent it.) Clicking the author link works really well! The site is clean and crisp. Very professional looking.

Read More

Natural Language Processing Only Goes So Far

The sirens call of natural language processing has been issued again. In this study, the researchers compared the use for free text searches to administrative codes to see which would give better indication of safety based on 20 indicators. The authors rightly suggest that instead of relying only on the notoriously poor check boxes used with discharge orders that the hand written notes form the discharge nurse or physician might be much more instructive.

Read More