Last week, we started discussing semantic integration. We did a brief introduction and now that the basics are settled let us look at ways to enrich the user experience using Semantics (the words from our taxonomies). We have a way to improve search. It is a search option driven by taxonomies that you can play with.
To discuss the semantic integration or the leveraging of a taxonomy in search, web sites mashups and other places, we should first review what they are. Let’s look at the definitions and then the integration of a taxonomy as a building block for the larger information architecture for an organization. We need to think of taxonomies in that bigger case when we are talking about where we apply them. Once those are out of the way I will review some use-cases and show what makes them work.
A couple of weeks ago there was a blog post, or repost by Jeff Carr, on the Early Site. I enjoyed reading it, and of course I have a few thoughts and places where I do not exactly agree. Let me take them on this week. There are 5 Myths. I will write about each of them separately. Myth #1: SharePoint now has taxonomy management.
Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in data integrity and content creation, has announced it has been awarded a U.S. Patent No. 8,046,212 for MAIChem™, a software-based method for searching chemical names in one or more text-containing documents that have been loaded into computer memory.
Is it final? Finally! I recall Rex Harrison playing Pope Julius II, shouting up to Charlton Heston as Michelangelo, something like, “When will it be finished?” To which Michelangelo-Heston replied enigmatically, “When I’m done!” Michelangelo spent most of five years (1477 to 1480) on his back painting the Sistine Chapel. The Pope’s impatience was not without justification as he was financing the project while trying to recapture former Papal territories filched by the Borgias.
Juliet: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet." Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2) True, but try finding the right document set for your current project by sniffing them out from within a database of 8 million similar smelling documents. This approach is all too common, very time consuming, and unreliable leaving you with aromatic, unpalatable results.
Software Provides Fast, In-Depth, Broad and Consistently Accurate Searches of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industry Data Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in data integrity and content creation, has announced it has been awarded a U.S. Patent No. 8,046,212 for MAIChem™, a software-based method for searching chemical names in one or more text-containing documents that have been loaded into computer memory.
The ASIST meeting was held in the delightful city of New Orleans this fall. The format, as well as the dates for the meeting was quite different this year and I found it refreshing. This is usually a heavily academic meeting and I go to keep my ears open to the research and trends that the Information Science and Library Schools are talking about. Every now and then there is a nugget I can use to enhance our products and services.
The passing of Steve Jobs gives us a chance to reflect on the business in general and, of course, how it affects us. The many incredible things he did and his inventions are very well covered in other more appropriate venues. The world changed significantly on his watch and he drove others to make amazing strides. We always admired the Apple systems and in fact were the first commercial installation of Apple IIe's in (at least in New Mexico) 1980. We bought 22 of the 48K main memory machines with single sided floppy 5.25 inch drives holding 512 K of data at one time. We had one machine with two floppy drives where we would copy the data for safe back up before transferring it to 9 track 1600 bpi tape on the Wang system for eventual conversion and delivery to the clients.
Is it really naïve to think two complimentary domains can be described by taxonomies and then mapped? Authors Robert L. Glass and Iris Vessey, in a recent Viewpoints column in IEEE Software published by the IEEE Computer Society, titled, “Naïveté Squared: In Search of Two Taxonomies and a Mapping Between Them” concluded they were naïve. The authors have long thought, there needs to be “a taxonomy of application domains; a taxonomy of solution approaches; and a mapping between the two.” They feel they were naïve because, despite promoting the need for several decades, it hasn’t happened. Or so they think.