Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in digital data organization, is proud to announce its inclusion on EContent magazine’s annual list of the top 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry.
Let’s look at the history of the MLs a little bit. Those are the markup languages for computer text processing. Markup languages started appearing in the 1960s. At that time, if you were a publisher, you would have your pages typeset by a professional typesetter or a typesetting company. The typesetters used to encode your data so that you couldn’t see the results until they generated the pages. The problem was that once a publisher had a large corpus of their publications set with a typesetter, they were handcuffed. They couldn’t leave very easily. Their data was so tied up with some particular typesetting system, the Penta system or whatever they were involved with. They couldn’t migrate. They couldn’t move. So, they were kind of imprisoned. The price kept going up every year because, well, “Where are you going to go? Hah!” It was very frustrating.
Here is a sneak peek at two of the in-depth case studies you will hear about during the meeting: Developing the PLOS Thesaurus: Jonas Dupuich of PLOS will tell the story of how PLOS identified the need to improve its thesaurus, completed the task of updating the thesaurus, and implemented services to leverage the thesaurus throughout the organization in partnership with Access Innovations. Expect to hear about lessons learned, best practices, and a glance at how PLOS is moving forward from here.
We’ve discussed what it takes to make the components of a digital information model work but one of the things that is most important, if you want it all to work together, is standards. There are several controlled vocabulary standards, as well as networking protocols that have an impact on taxonomy implementation. There are also standards having to do with markup and with metadata and data modeling that impact thesauri.
In traditional taxonomy construction, you approach the body of knowledge, head for your ivory tower with its closed room and decide on the general structure of the field or discipline. From that single point, or perhaps multiple points, of knowledge, you are going to design a completely new taxonomy … and every now and then that works.
When you are building a thesaurus, you can build it from the original text or from a new intellectual area. You can build from an existing vocabulary or from an existing topic. You can do a combination of the two. What often happens is that you take your text and apply it to a taxonomy you think might be fairly parallel, and then you customize it to meet your own needs. That is very common practice and it gets you there faster.
We’ve already discussed indexing. We are going to assign those terms to the documents based on the concepts. A thesaurus is also known as an indexing language. We’re controlling the synonyms – different terms for the same concept. They are polythemes or homonyms, depending on if you are European or stateside. They are the same words with different meanings, like lead.