Taxonomists like to view a vocabulary as a literary work, which is more artistic when the style is consistent and cohesive. Consistency – which leads to predictability when searching or browsing – also makes it easier to avoid unintentional inclusion of multiple preferred terms for a single concept.
I have a confession to make. I do not like sports. I do not watch sports. I know almost next to nothing about sports.
The DITA Content Management Strategies conference has added Carl Yao, CSOFT’s Executive Vice President for Global Strategy, to their roster of presenters. The convention is […]
Once you have a tentative list of terms for your taxonomy-to-be, it can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you have thousands of terms. (In scientific and technical fields, a typical taxonomy might have 5,000-10,000 terms.) How to start dealing with them all? A good first step is to organize the information into main categories. Choose some logical main areas, and don’t be too concerned up front about whether or not the areas or the initial wordings are exactly what you’ll ultimately want them to be. You’re just roughing things out at this stage. Then use those main areas as buckets, and dump the more specific terms into those buckets.
There’s been some discussion recently in the Taxonomy Community of Practice LinkedIn group about free or low cost thesaurus management software. I’ve noticed a dearth of postings about using Excel, a very popular tool, particularly if you already have a Microsoft Office license. Experts disparage Excel as a tool, but it can provide a way to start your thesaurus development. And, if you are mindful of organizing your Excel worksheet so that its data can be imported later into a dedicated tool, you can achieve some important objectives. Excel is indeed the most popular thesaurus management tool. (see Taxonomy & metadata strategies for effective content management workshop slides in which taxonomy expert Joe Busch reiterates this.)
Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in the data management industry, has collaborated with the Iowa Legislative Services Agency to build a customized thesaurus that allows the Iowa Legislature General Assembly to easily access its extensive legal body of existing and proposed laws, bills, acts, and regulations by using controlled, vocabulary-driven indexing in addition to published indexing codes.
To discuss the semantic integration or the leveraging of a taxonomy in search, web sites mashups and other places, we should first review what they are. Let’s look at the definitions and then the integration of a taxonomy as a building block for the larger information architecture for an organization. We need to think of taxonomies in that bigger case when we are talking about where we apply them. Once those are out of the way I will review some use-cases and show what makes them work.
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.
Labeling people based on behaviors is not a new technology or even behavior. This has been done since the beginning of time. However, with the advancement of semantic technology and the flood of data available, it has become overwhelming to discern a simplified approach to organization.
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.