Classifying Exoplanets: Where does Earth 2.0 fall?

On the 9th of January, 1992, astronomers around the world rejoiced. For the first time ever, they had definitive proof of a planet orbiting another star. These early observations were extremely limited, mainly focused on noticing the wobble of the parent star, but they opened the proverbial floodgate for exoplanet discovery. A little over two…

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Intern Opportunities

As we strive to be as helpful as possible to those in the fields of taxonomy, indexing, ontology, etc., we are excited to share career opportunities that we find with our readers. Even if you aren’t in the market for a career move, it is always good to stay on top of what is available and…

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Everything Goes Every Place It Fits

The traditional taxonomy is monohierarchical – there is one and only one place for every term. This is only sensible for many purposes; no one wants to look up a book in a library catalog only to find out that it is either in Section A or Section F, and no biologist would ever identify…

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Time for Camp

Taxonomies can be powerful tools when developed properly and by professionals. This year’s Taxonomy Boot Camp is about highlighting taxonomy’s many faces and sharing practical solutions in different real-world environments. Anyone can learn how taxonomies can help improve the user experience and dynamically publish web content and hear about large-scale metadata optimization projects and the…

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Expressing Culture in Coffee Classification

It is always interesting to me when I find taxonomies of interesting and unusual topics. Even if they aren’t true taxonomies, they are typically classifications of some form or another, and they provide information, which is, after all, the goal. The latest find: Gizmodo recently published “A Taxonomy Of Hip Coffee Shop Names.” We have come…

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The Thesaurus as a Domain Model in the Modern World

Source: Dreamstime Nowadays, taxonomies and thesauri are used largely for web navigation and for information search and retrieval. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, it’s largely the digital information revolution that has made their use for information search and retrieval a vital necessity in research, business, and numerous other types of activities. Taxonomies and…

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Where to Start?

The Library of Congress started taking steps in 2010 toward preserving the nation’s increasingly digital heritage — by acquiring Twitter’s entire archive of tweets and planning to make it all available to researchers. This interesting news came from Politico in their article, “Library of Congress’ Twitter archive is a huge #FAIL.” Yes, you read that right.…

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