A new glossary of terminology related to big data has been created. The authors state that it is an evolving list, and they invite contributions. This “wiki” glossary appears to be very comprehensive, with terms from aggregation to zettabytes.
Last week, my co-workers and I were discussing points of knowledge. The phrase “a thousand terms of knowledge” popped up. It was apparently an off-the-cuff mingling of “a thousand points of light” with “points of knowledge” and with one of the topics of the moment, thesaurus terms. I couldn’t resist following up on the mixture, which has a precedent of sorts in an earlier TaxoDiary blog posting by Marjorie Hlava.
You really aren't all that surprised if you have read TaxoDiary with any amount of consistency over the years. I love quirky and unusual taxonomies, so considering the season of course I found a turkey taxonomy.
The defining characteristic of taxonomies is the key to hierarchical relationships. It is vital to be sure this step is accurate and the relationships are true. Generic relationships, as explained in ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 (page 47), identifies the link between a class and its members or species. The generic relationship is generally called the Broader term/Narrower term relationship. In most cases, it’s easy in traditional biological taxonomy of organisms, because of its well-established and well-known groupings of phyla, genera, families, species, and so forth, i.e., Rodents and NT Squirrels.
This small town police records management crashing may not seem like breaking news, but if you were dependent on the information found in the records, you might think differently. Records management is a key part of any organization's information technology strategy, or should be.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) will soon publish its proposed 2014 GAAP Taxonomy as a preview of what they will require in the coming year for filing financial statements in XBRL. This information was found on Compliance Week in their article, “FASB Plans 2014 Taxonomy Release, Webcast to Explain.”
Recently, I was watching a show on the Weather Channel about the “discovery” of a previously unrecognized type of cloud. This intrigued me, as I’ve always wondered how the “official” classifications of various kinds of things come about, and just who has the authority somehow to establish the classifications and terminology. We all know at least some of the standard cloud types – cirrus, cumulus, cumulonimbus, etc. (If you want to know all the types and subtypes, check out Wikipedia’s “List of cloud types”.) Who decided on those names and types, and why?
Scope has developed a taxonomy for PracticeUpdate, an e-portal that offers an array of professional research, information and education resources. This project contracted by Elsevier Health Services with the key business objective being to support more personalization of the user experience for PracticeUpdate. The solution required the development of a taxonomy for a number of medical domains. The taxonomy is essential for optimal filtering of results for the target audience and refining search results.
Terms in an equivalence relationship refer to the same concept (or sometimes a roughly equivalent concept). They are usually synonyms. As has already been discussed, there should be only one “indexing term” or preferred term in your thesaurus for any given concept. You can and should include synonyms of those preferred terms in your thesaurus as synonyms. And the way to do that is with equivalence relationships. The synonyms that aren’t “preferred terms” are “non-preferred terms” in the same term record. Your taxonomy software instructions will indicate how to add non-preferred terms to term records; this action will establish an equivalence relationship between the preferred term and each non-preferred term.