Trees, Fractals, and Taxonomies

If you look at a branch of a typical deciduous tree, you can see that it looks like a smaller tree. Likewise, that branch branches off into smaller branches that look like even smaller trees. This characteristic of trees is an example of what mathematicians, biologists, and systems scientists call self-similarity. Self-similar systems repeat their basic geometry at smaller and smaller scales, creating multiple miniatures of themselves at different scales. In general, natural and mathematical systems in which self-similarity results in complex and detailed patterns are referred to as fractal systems.

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Thesaurus evolution – a case study in “Synthetic biology”

The following post, by Rachel Drysdale, originally appeared in PLOS BLOGS on April 8, 2014. Science does not stand still and neither does the PLOS thesaurus. With more than 10,700 Subject Area terms, we use the thesaurus to index our articles and provide useful links to related papers, enhanced search functions, and, for PLOS ONE (more…

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Access Innovations, Inc. Now Accepting Presentation Abstracts for the Eleventh Annual Data Harmony Users Group Meeting

Access Innovations, Inc. is pleased to announce the Call for Presentations for the 2015 Data Harmony Users Group (DHUG) meeting, held every February at Access Innovations company headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico. DHUG 2015 is the eleventh annual meeting and will focus on leveraging of taxonomies and tagged data, techniques for integrating tagged data flows into production cycles, and inventive ways to improve the user experience.

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Key Components

Search engines are determined to provide users with as much information as possible. Some companies are forming strategic partnerships to create rich search results for better user experience.

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Blind Alleys, Dead Ends, and Mazes

Taxonomies can be displayed in a variety of ways. One of the display types that we occasionally see is known as the flat format display. It’s described in the main U.S. standard for controlled vocabularies, ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies, published by the National Information Standards Organization.

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