Choosing the Right Partner

Infolinx System Solutions was chosen by the District of Columbia Department of Human Resources (DCHR) for their enterprise physical records management software. This recently completed the installation is an upgrade to manage approximately 35,000 active employee records.

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Resolving Challenges Through Taxonomies

Concept Searching will be a Gold Sponsor of SharePoint Fest – Chicago, taking place on October 7-9 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center. Technical classes and seminars will be taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft engineers, and Microsoft Most Valued Professionals.

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Types of Hierarchical Relationships

The defining characteristic of taxonomies is the presence of hierarchical relationships. Information specialists recognize several types of hierarchical relationships. Generic relationship – As explained in ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 (page 47), “This relationship identifies the link between a class and its members or species.” The generic relationship is generally called the Broader term/Narrower term relationship. In most cases, it’s easy in traditional biological taxonomy of organisms, because of its well-established and well-known groupings of phyla, genera, families, species, and so forth, i.e., Rodents and NT Squirrels.

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Webinar on Practical Classification – This Week!

The SLA Taxonomy Division presents the second webinar in their Practical Classification series. Sharon Garewal, from JSTOR, and Marcie Zaharee, from MITRE, will each describe how they use tools to build thesauri and classify data. Mark your calendar now for October 3, 2013 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST. The webinars are free to division members. SLA members may attend for $15, or contact SLA to add the division for $20. Non-members may attend for $50. Register here.

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Time to Play

We learned in kindergarten that you can learn and play at the same time. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that someone has introduced an application to visualize thesaurus, taxonomies or controlled vocabularies in an entertaining manner.

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Keeping Things Clear

In a controlled vocabulary, we strive for disambiguation, the restriction and clarification of meaning. We want to determine and clarify what exactly is meant by each term. Reading could mean a town in England or it could be a communication process. We might have the word ‘cells’, meaning biological microsystems or electrical equipment or prison housing or other things. You can have a terrorist cell. Cell is a broadly used term, and without some kind of a modifier around it, we can’t be sure what it is exactly.

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Supporting the Role of Taxonomists

The new phase of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) Open Access Support Project (EOASP) started last month, but with some slight changes in the eligibility criteria. The goal of the EOASP project is to increase the data flow into EOL, promoting the open access publishing model in taxonomy. Education is also part of the project as they value the importance of supporting and educating the next generation of taxonomists in open science principles.

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Terms and Style

Taxonomists like to view a vocabulary as a literary work, which is more artistic when the style is consistent and cohesive. Consistency – which leads to predictability when searching or browsing – also makes it easier to avoid unintentional inclusion of multiple preferred terms for a single concept.

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