Leveraging Your Taxonomy – Part 10 (Taxonomies in SharePoint)

I hope this series on search has been helpful to users and professionals alike. Let’s close with a look at taxonomies in SharePoint. Let’s look at this data flow in another way. We have incoming information; going to dump into a repository. We need to add metadata to that repository. We want to add taxonomy terms. The taxonomy terms all need to be controlled or suggested. So, there’s a backend to do that. Once we have the data in that repository it could be exported to a SQL or a relational database, transactional system, for e-commerce. It might be put into a repository so that the full displays can be done. It might be loaded into a search system and you also might have a presentation layer for display.

Read More

The Challenges of Search

Revising the search query in the world of search is not new news. When a user is looking for results, there is little patience with vague results. Much like Google’s millions of results confuses searchers and often wears them down from continuing the search.

Read More

Leveraging Your Taxonomy – Part 9

As we continue the series on search, we are close to wrapping up with a more in-depth look behind the scenes of database management systems. Let’s take a quick look at behind the scenes. We want to connect the database management system to the thesaurus tool so that we can validate the terms and make sure that they are in good shape and, as people are adding records to the database, if they have any suggestions or candidates, we want to lock those in as well. The thesaurus tool will tell you which terms are actually correct, allow you to add, change, and delete, and otherwise manage the term base. Then the indexing is used to actually suggest indexing terms to records as they are loaded to the database management system. That system can be SharePoint, it could be a content management system, it could be a Documentum or a FileNet, or any other thing you want to use as a repository to manage your data. That is driven by the taxonomy.

Read More

EBSCO Launches eBook Subscription

EBSCO Publishing has released their first subscription eBook collection – eBook Academic Subscription Collection™. The full-text eBooks cover a broad spectrum of academic subjects with the nearly 70,000 titles.

Read More

New Semantic Search Engine

A new semantic search engine that classifies and analyzes the meaning of text has been developed by NEC. Now users will be able to locate text related to a keyword by referencing keyword aspects, thus enabling a more dynamic search result.

Read More

Leveraging Your Taxonomy – Part 8

As we continue the series on search and how it works we are looking at file indexes more completely, more specifically complex inverted file indexes.

Stemming is the de-pluralization or removing the gerund endings. It is also called lemmatization. Truncation – left and right – are popular parts of search. Right, in some cases, chopping a word off at its end; is pretty easy. Left-hand truncation is hard because if you look at this wild card in the word ‘organization’ which can be spelled with either an ‘s’ or a ‘z’, depending on where you are from, the ‘-ation’ can be chopped off pretty easily but the right part, I have to build an entire index, starting with o, or, org, org, so that I can go through all of those to see where the full extension is. When people do left-hand truncation, it is a lot more expensive. It is a much bigger, additional index.

Read More