Taxodiary – Access Insights

Thoughts on ORCID

By Melody Smith|June 18th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, indexing, reference|Comments Off on Thoughts on ORCID

A new and powerful tool is headed our way. I believe it has the potential to change the way we interact with researchers, contributors and authors in general. I have already reported on the Contributor ID meeting in Boston mid-May. One of the main reasons for the timing of that meeting was the ORCID Outreach meeting to be held at the Microsoft office next to MIT in Cambridge. The aim of ORCID is to "solve the name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications by creating a registry of persistent unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID, other ID schemes, and research objects such as publications, grants, and patents."

Of Taxonomies, Biology, and Moneyball

By Melody Smith|June 11th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Of Taxonomies, Biology, and Moneyball

Baseball and biology are not commonly found in the same conceptual space. Neither do you find taxonomy associated with baseball, but in recent news these connections were made. Grant Bisbee, editor of “Baseball Nation”, digresses into the arcane as he laments the coming of the “He’s In the Best Shape of His Life” season. This is the time of year baseball writers must assess the prospects for the coming season, and clichés and hyperbole reign. The dubious practice of evaluating the physical condition of players runs rampant as spring training begins. With tongue in cheek, Bisbee tries to shape a taxonomy to classify this spring ritual. His would be the taxonomy of the “In the Best-shape Stories”.

Author Contributions – A Confusing and Imprecise Science

By Melody Smith|June 4th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, metadata, ontology|Comments Off on Author Contributions – A Confusing and Imprecise Science

In Boston on May 16 at Harvard University, The Wellcome Trust hosted the International Workshop on Contributorship and Scholarly Attribution. Several presenters outlined other roles we should probably begin to acknowledge and what those roles are. Over the last two weeks I reported on some of the talks made at the workshop. This is the final summary from that meeting. Ginny Barbour is the chief editor of PLOS Medicine for the well-known Public Library of Science (PLoS). Her talk was on “PLOS: Big science and medicine and the attribution of authorship.” She pointed out that past solutions for author attribution do not work. Big science and the accompanying data sets create new attribution problems. “We have been trying to solve the wrong problem” she said.

Giving Credit

By Melody Smith|May 28th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, indexing, News, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Giving Credit

While watching the end of a movie last night to see where exactly it was filmed, I paid attention to the credits. Coming from a publishing perspective, I tried matching what they list to what we capture about the author, researcher, and creator in a bibliographic citation. What are the matches? The film lists the animation team, the animal handlers, the costume designers, the makeup artists, the photographers, the accounting team, and on and on and on. There are hundreds of people behind the scenes, and they are all listed in the credits. What do we list for a team of 3000 researchers working on a big data project? We cite a few authors with a spare affiliation line and an acknowledgement to the funders. What about the rest of the contributors? Are there others that should be cited?

Contribution Recognition and Authorship

By Melody Smith|May 21st, 2012|Access Insights, Featured|Comments Off on Contribution Recognition and Authorship

Our world is information changing. Big data needs big teams to create and then communicate the results. In the olden days someone would do an experiment, find some interesting results to share, write it up, send to a journal and two years later after peer review copy editing, typesetting (later photo composition), printing, binding, and mailing it would arrive at their colleagues desk. But today the team writes up a big proposal get funding, finds 3000 staff members to work on the experiments, gather the data and publish or otherwise communicate the results. In the first example it was easy to say who the author was, they may have acknowledged others and thanked them for their support. Now there are many roles in research and attribution is complex. I am sure you have noticed how long the credits in the movie theater are now. Will we be moving to a similar model?

Maintaining a Thesaurus in an Excel Workbook, Part 2

By Melody Smith|May 14th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Standards, Taxonomy|1 Comment

In Part 1, we looked at maintaining a taxonomy in Excel – a set of preferred terms arranged in a hierarchy. This taxonomy structure is a handy way to organize a group of terms and can be used across an industry for benchmarking or reporting requirements (see Strategies for Incorporating Data Exchange Standards in E-Business Taxonomies advocating for the construction industry and The IFRS Taxonomy, including the labels used in the International Financial Reporting Standards). Excel works quite well to create and maintain a taxonomy, but how about a thesaurus?

Natural Language Processing Only Goes So Far

By Melody Smith|May 7th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, search, semantic|Comments Off on Natural Language Processing Only Goes So Far

The sirens call of natural language processing has been issued again. In this study, the researchers compared the use for free text searches to administrative codes to see which would give better indication of safety based on 20 indicators. The authors rightly suggest that instead of relying only on the notoriously poor check boxes used with discharge orders that the hand written notes form the discharge nurse or physician might be much more instructive.

The DSM-5 Draft: Half-Baked Meatloaf?

By Melody Smith|April 30th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|1 Comment

For a short time in the 1990s, I helped a small company develop proposals for providing mental health services. My desk housed two standard references: the Chicago Manual of Style, and the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of the American Psychological Association (APA). The DSM is essentially a classification system, like a taxonomy, providing a structured list of the psychiatric diagnoses used by mental health practitioners.

Access Innovations, Inc. Creates Taxonomy For Iowa Code, Administrative Code, and Acts

By Melody Smith|April 23rd, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Access Innovations, Inc. Creates Taxonomy For Iowa Code, Administrative Code, and Acts

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.

Maintaining a Thesaurus in an Excel Workbook

By Melody Smith|April 16th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy, Term lists|Comments Off on Maintaining a Thesaurus in an Excel Workbook

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.)