Access Innovations Completes Thesaurus Project for Mark Allen Group

Access Innovations, Inc., creator of the award-winning Data Harmony semantic enrichment software, is proud to announce the recent completion of a thesaurus project with British journal publisher Mark Allen Group (MAG). MAG wanted to jump-start a semantics program that would provide maximum value via content enrichment, so engaged with Access Innovations, leaders in semantic enrichment…

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Clearing the Fog

We have all been there. It might be in the middle of a professional conversation or social gathering and someone uses a word you think you know, but you aren’t totally sure what it means, so you refrain from making any comments that might reveal your doubt (or ignorance). It is understandable that no one…

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Go Baby Go!

The Kentucky Derby may be the most widely anticipated and discussed two-minute sports event of the year. For folks outside the 30-mile radius of Louisville, Kentucky, it is just a horse race. For folks inside that radius, “derby” is a culture, one of big hats, bow ties, and bourbon. As an aside, let me say…

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Express Yourself

Express yourself may have been Madonna’s instructions but it also comes from our parents, grandparents, and especially our teachers. Middle school teachers, apparently, are holding funerals for “boring words”—necessary standards like “said,” “go,” “walk,” “see,” “run”—and eulogizing them with more “sophisticated” words. Splice Today brought this interesting information to us in their article, “Tarting Up the Language.”…

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Using N-grams to discover taxonomy terms

Words that occur together frequently are likely to encode important concepts. Therefore, simply sorting a list of phrases according to the frequency of occurrence in text is an automatic way of capturing important concepts associated with that subject. Word order is important since meaning tends to be associated with order. Thus, word order must be…

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Choosing Terms for a Taxonomy or Other Controlled Vocabulary

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Murray_OED_vocabulary_types_diagram.svg. Original source: First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Image redrawn by User:DavidPKendal after the diagram by James Murray, first editor of the OED.   Recently, we’ve looked at choosing controlled vocabulary terms. More specifically, we’ve considered related terms, choosing non-preferred terms, and choosing broader and narrower terms.  In this final installment of our…

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Choosing Non-Preferred (and Preferred) Terms for a Thesaurus

© Kellyplz | Dreamstime.com – Squirrels Making Wishes. Photo Synonyms and other non-preferred terms are largely what make a taxonomy (or other controlled vocabulary) a thesaurus. They can enrich a vocabulary in a variety of ways. Searches on a vocabulary can take advantage of non-preferred synonyms to direct the search from those words or phrases…

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Choosing Related Terms

Source: Dreamstime  Which quiche? You’ll have to read to the end to find out. As many of our readers are aware, hierarchical thesauri are distinguished from other taxonomies by (among other things) the inclusion of non-hierarchical relationships among terms. One main type of non-hierarchical relationship is the equivalence relationship, which is usually expressed as a…

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To Cap or Not to Cap?

Every once in a while, the issue of capitalization in taxonomies and thesauri pops up. Some of us in taxonomy land believe that it does make a difference what capitalization (versus lower case) style you use. We just don’t necessarily agree what that style should be.

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Show Me the Money

By 2025, the Winklevoss twins, more known for their legal battles with former classmate Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook, predicts a “cashless society” will dominate with the virtual currency bitcoin.

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