During the initial stages of discussing a new taxonomy project, I am frequently asked questions like: How granular does my taxonomy need to be? How many levels deep should the vocabulary go? And especially: How many terms should my thesaurus have? The answer is—of course—it depends.
Access Innovations, Inc. announces the Author Submit extension module as part of their Data Harmony Version 3.9 release. Author Submit is a Data Harmony application for integration of author-selected subject metadata information into a publishing workflow during the paper submissions or upload process. Author Submit facilitates the addition of taxonomy terms by the author. With Author Submit, each author provides subject metadata from the publisher taxonomy to accompany the item they are submitting. During the submission process, Data Harmony’s M.A.I. core application suggests subject terms based on a controlled vocabulary, and the author chooses appropriate terms to describe the content of their document, thus enabling early categorization and selection of peer reviewers and support for trend analysis.
Collaboration is a key component of research. Original research papers with a single author are — particularly in the life sciences — a vanishing breed. This makes it difficult to identify author contributions and acknowledgements, as well as to mine any data from the unstructured information.
When we (at least those of us in Greater Mexico) hear of or read about Cinco de Mayo there is no question in our minds that “Mayo” refers to the month of May. The preceding “Cinco de” (Spanish for “Fifth of”) pretty much clinches it. Of course, if the overall content is in Spanish, there might still might be some ambiguity about whether it is the holiday that is being referred to, or simply a date that happens to be the one after the fourth of May. (As in “Hey, what day do we get off work?” “The fourth of July, I think.”)
I would like to make some observations about statistics-based categorization and search, and about the advantages that their proponents claim. First of all, statistics-based co-occurrence approaches do have their place. For wide-ranging bodies of text such as email archives and social media exchanges, and for assessing the nature of an unknown collection of documents, a well-defined collection of concepts covering a pre-determined area of study and practice is not possible. For lack of this foundation, and for lack of other practical approaches, attempts at analysis fall back on less-than -ideal mathematical approaches.
Data Harmony onscreen interface tabs, button-names, menu options, dialog boxes, text-boxes, and actual computer code examples: Each category is presented in a different emphasis and font-style in the software instructions, to reduce confusion for the new reader.
In 2014, we improved the instruction manuals significantly – to be more comprehensive without being harder on the eyes. We upgraded the documentation to be even clearer, more consistent and complete than before, while removing extraneous material.
I like the variety of exports available. We’re still creating custom ones for content and web content management systems that require specialized formats, and we’ll continue to do that. But now we can offer exports of limited (top) levels of a hierarchy and exports that include only the fields that you want.
I think the changes in the TestMAI function are really exciting. If you’re loading files from a directory, Data Harmony now remembers that directory rather than requiring you to find the full path each time. And, once you have loaded or pasted in text to index and press the M.A.I. button, in addition to seeing the suggested terms, you see the matches that activated rules to suggest those terms - or not; it’s really easy to turn off the highlighting with a Ctrl+L key press.