Featured – Page 80

Name Disambiguation Musings

By Melody Smith | April 25, 2011 |

The Wall Street Journal on April 19, 2011 talked about the need for customer name authority control in banks. Okay, so maybe that is not what they said. What they did outline was the problem Arabic names and the many ways to state them gives to banks and other organizations which try to track the information or put a hold on funds for organizations like the example, Moammar Gadhafi. Also know as many other names. His first name could be transliterated as Muammar, Mummar, Mohamed Mahmut, Mehmud and more than 20 other variants. The same goes last name could be Gaddafi, Ghathafi, Elkaddafi, El-Kaddafi, Al-Gaddafi, Gadhafi, Qaddafi, Al-Qadhafi, El-Qaddfi, Qadhafi, Abu Miryar Al-Qahafi, Ghadaffi, and others. Any combination of these names is valid. There are further complications of the Abu or Al or El and other designations of honor make things even more interesting.

The Power Of Survey Taxonomies To Skew The Results The Way You Want Them

By Melody Smith | April 18, 2011 |

I went to the doctor’s office this week and they asked if I would participate in a short Federal survey. I said sure. What followed was beyond frustrating.

Semantic Enrichment for Publishers: Beyond Search and Browse

By Melody Smith | April 11, 2011

Using taxonomies and semantic tagging of articles to enable subject browsing and to improve Search are two of the most popular reasons why publishers invest in semantic technology, but the potential benefits are not limited to these two applications.

Taxonomy Standardization is Going On Everywhere

By Melody Smith | April 4, 2011

The entire idea of using a controlled vocabulary, a.k.a. thesaurus, a.k.a. ontology, a.k.a. taxonomy, a.k.a. authority file, a.k.a. a pick list, a.k.a. attribute table –is to standardize the nomenclature an organization uses to tag, keyword, add descriptors, controlled vocabulary, subject heading, content tags, semantic indexing, etc., to their content so it can be found, searched, retrieved,… well, you get the idea.

Indexing with Related Terms

By Melody Smith | March 28, 2011

A Taxonomy is an organization system. It is a controlled vocabulary, containing a parent-child or hierarchical relationship, the specificity happens at the lower levels, at the branches, at the leaflets – or at the end of the list. They are very common on websites. They are also commonly supported as pick lists — a drop down menu of ten or twelve items. Sometimes they are browsable directories. There are many different ways to put them in play. There are not many standards as yet for taxonomies but there are many standards for thesauri.

To Really Help a Searcher, Show the Taxonomy

By Melody Smith | March 21, 2011

A recent post on a popular taxonomy community website asked for examples of websites that use a thesaurus. The writer was seeking sites that show the user that a thesaurus is being used to direct them from a query word to a taxonomy term. She was looking for a way to support searchers on a company by translating search queries that may be synonyms to terms in their large product taxonomy to deliver content indexed with the preferred term. She also questioned whether the redirection from a query word to a taxonomy term would be clear and intuitive for the searcher.

Taxonomies in Book Store Organizations

By Melody Smith | March 14, 2011

There are many approaches to the building of a thesaurus and taxonomy. No absolutely right or absolutely wrong methods exist but there are some that are not as efficient as others. Some which lead to bias in the resulting work. Some which will not work with the data the client actually wants to surface on a website or data mine or tag. There are some very expensive approaches and some very practical approaches to doing the work.

How Secure is Your Geodata?

By Melody Smith | March 7, 2011 |

There has been lots of talk lately about stalkers locating you based on the photos you post online using your smart phone or GPS enabled mobile phone. I have received numerous emails from concerned friends and family warning me of the dire straits and danger lurking around the next photo I post of my dogs at the park. Truthfully, I deleted them all. “It’s just another urban myth,” I thought to myself.

Taxonomies and Social Media

By Melody Smith | February 28, 2011

Any discussion of online media today cannot ignore the elephant in the room that is social media. Facebook will reach 700 Million Users by the end of 2011, according to Ted Shelton of Open-First. If anyone had any doubts about the revolutionary power of social media in general and Facebook in particular, those doubts have certainly been swept away by recent events in the Middle East. Not least among the many disruptions caused by social media is the way it has changed how people search, discover, and use content. Significantly, this impact is not limited to people’s personal lives, because social media is increasingly being used by businesses and institutions. Agencies and corporate marketers are scrambling to come up with ways to control messaging across the over 900 million “Tweets” generated by Twitter users every month, but these one-to-many and many-to-many communications (via “re-tweets”) have revolutionized the way business is conducted. Content professionals, and especially those in Knowledge Management and Enterprise Content Management, are beginning to ask what role we should be playing in this unfolding trend.

Taxonomy Information Sources

By Melody Smith | February 21, 2011

I am often asked where can I find out more about software and taxonomies to reuse? There are a number of attempts to organize taxonomy resources on the web. Some are more up to date than others.