Taxodiary – Search Results

Search as Big Brother, Molding What You See and Think

By Melody Smith|2011-05-30T16:34:43-04:00May 30th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, search, Taxonomy|3 Comments

A recent TED presentation is by Eli Pariser. He is the author of “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You.” A new and very interesting book. His talk is a synopsis of how the Google personalization algorithms effect search results. Google results are influenced by your own search history and other online activity. Any system such as Amazon, Yahoo, Bing ebay shopping systems depend heavily on personalization to serve you results. Traditional databases do not use profiles (yet) but they are often based on Verity, Vivisimo, Autonomy, Fast and other mathematically based search software so they could and they do serve up different results whenever the vectors are reset - that is every time additional data is added to the system with updates or metadata enrichment.

Adventures of a TaxoTourist

By Melody Smith|2011-05-23T10:09:42-04:00May 23rd, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy, Term lists|Comments Off on Adventures of a TaxoTourist

The trip was awesome—a dream exotic vacation to Bali. It was not about eat, pray, love, but a rather unbalanced midpoint to meet my Oz-dwelling daughter. I enjoyed dashes of ecotourism and agritourism, but even in full vacation mode I couldn’t fully suppress my perspective as a taxonomist.

Not True!

By Melody Smith|2011-05-11T15:07:18-04:00May 9th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Folksonomy, search, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Not True!

The Autonomy folks must be getting worried about the progress of taxonomy applications and the precision and recall that such systems provide. Autonomy and Google live on relevance rankings as the return to the user. Relevance to me is a confidence game. It is the best guess of the system as to whether the results returned will actually match the user's request. If you have a big enough data set returned, certainly something in there will be useful. But the sheer amount of items the user has to review (or amount of noise they have to look at) is very annoying. So they rank the returns by relevance based on a number of statistical factors so the most likely items based on co-occurrence with terms matches and near matches will appear at the top of the list - that is, they will be relevance ranked.

Taxonomy Standardization is Going On Everywhere

By Melody Smith|2011-04-04T13:51:55-04:00April 4th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Standards, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Taxonomy Standardization is Going On Everywhere

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.

Why Use A Taxonomy Management Tool?

By Melody Smith|2011-02-15T10:28:48-05:00February 14th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|2 Comments

This question was recently asked and addressed in a community online forum that my colleagues and I participate in quite frequently. It occurred to me that though it seems like a simple question with an even simpler answer to those of us who live, breathe and eat this stuff every day – it certainly bears revisiting.

Thesaurus from – and for – the Farm

By Melody Smith|2011-02-01T11:41:06-05:00February 1st, 2011|indexing, News, reference, Technology, Term lists|1 Comment

The USDA has announced release of the 2011 edition of the on-line NAL Agricultural Thesaurus and Glossary (NALT). This release adds 3,441 new terms and 321 definitions to these vocabulary tools.

Best Practices for Creating and Maintaining a Thesaurus with Thesaurus Master or MAIstro

By Melody Smith|2010-12-16T11:28:32-05:00December 8th, 2010|Access Insights, Term lists|1 Comment

by Barbara Gilles, Access Innovations thesaurian

Observing the practices described below for building a thesaurus will help ensure:

Effective searches to enable actual retrieval
A rich and […]

Automatic Indexing: A Matter of Degree

By Melody Smith|2010-12-16T21:24:30-05:00December 8th, 2010|Access Insights, Autoindexing, ontology, Taxonomy|1 Comment

by Marjorie M.K. Hlava October 2002
First published in the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 29 No. 1, October/November […]

Howlers: New Automation and Human Models Challenge Traditional Indexing

By Melody Smith|2010-12-16T21:35:37-05:00December 8th, 2010|Access Insights, Autoindexing, indexing, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Howlers: New Automation and Human Models Challenge Traditional Indexing

by John Blossom
reprinted from www.shore.com/commentary

The National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS) is an interesting collection of institutions and publishers joining to tackle […]

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