Words Can Be a Lifelong Career

A 76-year old lexicographer continues working with his passion of the English language and all the intricacies that come along with it. He compiles dictionaries on a variety of topics and updates them as new words come into use. This very interesting news came to us from the Poughkeepsie Journal in their article, “Local wordsmith’s…

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Making Better Use of Data

Pre-processing and indexing data in one operation with the new add-on for Splunk creates new performance and ergonomic value for users. This interesting information came to us from EIN News in their article, “New Splunk Add-On Streamlines Data Preparation, Indexing, and Visualization.” Splunk is an indexing and visualization platform and with this new add-on by Innovative…

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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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Font Awareness

Shelf Awareness is a Web-based resource for readers and those in the book trade. It was brought my attention by Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness’s book review editor. (Full disclosure, Marilyn is my cousin.) I bring this wonderful resource to your attention for a variety of reasons not the least of which is their free email newsletter service for readers and one for professionals in the book trade. Twice a week I get an email containing reviews of a wide variety of new, recent, and sometimes classic, fiction and nonfiction works.

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You Cannot Classify Unless You Connect

October 4, 2010 — One of the facts of classification and indexing is that one has to have access to the content. Most users of a system assume that any content in an organization is available in an electronic system. That assumption is incorrect. The reason is that certain systems use a proprietary file format…

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Microsoft and Its Taxonomy of Intents

July 19, 2010 — Xiaosin Yin and Sarthak Shah wrote a paper published in April 2010, “Building Taxonomy of Web Search Intents for Name Entity Queries.” We revisited this paper because Yahoo announced that it was considering a service that used popular queries for a new Yahoo news service. You can read a summary of…

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Yahoo and Popularity Driven News

July 6, 2010 — Access Innovations, the sponsor of this post, is in the indexing and classification business. Humans have grouped events, people, and information for millennia. We read with interest the New York Times article about search and the Softpedia commentary. When you read this, the New York Times article will not be easily available.…

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Semantic Taxonomy Induction

“Semantic Taxonomy Induction from Heterogeneous Evidence” became available in 2006. It was one of the first presentations of a method that is apparently becoming increasingly important at a certain large Web search company.

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Indexing: Chopping Logic

June 4, 2010 – The Nieman Journalism Lab’s “Aggregators, Curators, and Indexers: There’s a Difference and It Matters” makes a great deal of sense. You will want to read the original write-up by C. W.Anderson. For us, the most interesting comment was: Anytime you hear someone talk about Google News, The Huffington Post, Gawker, blogging,…

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