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Connecting the Taxonomy with Search
A customer asked me “how is the taxonomy connected to search?” Their search vendor says they can implement the full taxonomy. This is such a simple question – such a long winded answer below.
Read MoreCoordinating Platform and Taxonomy Implementations Intelligently
Why is it that people seem to feel that they need to get the platform and the technology in place and tested before they ever work on the organization of their information and cleaning up the data? They do not look at the data and what the data needs to be best used by the user community. I am repeatedly getting told that the DTD/Schema for the data and the taxonomy
implementation have been pushed back because they are working on implementing the platform. What do they think the platform is for? Without well organized and well formed test data how will they even begin to know that the system will be able to work well for their information? How do they know that the user can find anything in the proposed system if they have no idea what the data is like? Where are the taxonomy terms going to go in the database or the record or the system? How are they bound to the information they reference? Building the platform first is like buying a pair of shoes without knowing either the size of the foot or the occasion for which they are to be worn. Rant! Rant
Time for the Music Ontology
At this time in history, there’s so much music to describe. There have been so many compositions, so many recordings, and so many performances. How can we sort through it all? There are music databases that the public can contribute to, but how can we make the data consistent enough to be searchable?
Read MoreOntologies and Semantic Networks
As knowledge organization systems increase in complexity, we have increasing numbers of dimensions or features or ways to define the terms. Semantic networks help with bringing all those concepts together and tagging them so that you can look at them in lots of different ways.
Read MoreFrom Taxonomy to Thesaurus
Nowadays, taxonomy and thesaurus often are used interchangeably. Indeed, we can consider a hierarchical thesaurus (which most are these days) as a fancy taxonomy. In either case, we use the controlled vocabulary for the indexing and retrieval. The hierarchical array is for our convenience for either navigating the collection when we are searching or for organizing the terms.
Read MoreConnecting Taxonomies
I’ve been asked if taxonomies can be connected. The thinking was, if these taxonomies are standardized, or at least mostly standardized, it seems that there should be a way that taxonomies can be connected in various organizational systems.
Read MoreInterdisciplinary Taxonomies
People need to decide when they are building their taxonomy if they have one point of origin or if they are interdisciplinary. Some firms start with a one-point path; it is that path and that path alone that drives the firm. They have a single point of origin. They will need to clearly state term relationships, which is not always done.
Read MoreUses for a Thesaurus
A thesaurus can be used for several different purposes. It is mainly used for information retrieval, in one way or another. We use it in information retrieval both on the search end and in the tagging of the records.
Read MoreFrom Simple to Complex
People talk about different kinds of vocabularies. The differences usually have to do with the structure, or lack thereof. Sometimes, people refer to “flat lists”. These are one-level lists with no hierarchical structure. They can be uncontrolled or controlled lists. An uncontrolled list is a simple, flat structure. The uncontrolled list is your “Saturday list”.
Read MorePre or Post-Coordinate Indexing?
Most people think about what they want to search for and are willing to combine their concepts at the time of search. If you think of the way people search in Google, they put in the combination of terms they are thinking of; they are doing the coordination of terms. It is up to the search software to do the intersection of the terms for them and figure out the post-coordination.
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