Taxodiary – Taxonomy

My Other Life

By Melody Smith|August 2nd, 2013|News, Taxonomy|Comments Off on My Other Life

I have another life outside the taxonomy world; one that often reminds me how connected we all really are in this world. I am attending a conference on faith-based communications. See, I told you it was a different life. While doing the "meet and greet" with fellow attendees, one mentioned she used to teach library and information sciences before feeling a call to write and even start her own small publishing company. The others around us queried her about the books, etc. and I waited patiently to ask her about her previous life. You see, when I tell people I write about taxonomy the response is almost always, "Is that about dead animals?"

Why Do We Need Taxonomies and Thesauri?

By Melody Smith|July 29th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Why Do We Need Taxonomies and Thesauri?

When an organization asks us to create a taxonomy or thesaurus, it’s usually because they want to be able to manage a collection.Taxonomies and thesauri are both types of controlled vocabularies. In controlled vocabularies intended for indexing, each concept covered by the vocabulary is represented by one and only one term that is valid for indexing. (True, a thesaurus contains synonyms, but in most computer-based thesauri, these take the form of “non-preferred” synonyms that point to the preferred terminology for the concept.) If the taxonomy or thesaurus is managed consistently, so they will get the same answers/results every time. They don’t want to get a different answer every time they do a search.

A Dying Profession?

By Melody Smith|July 29th, 2013|News, Taxonomy|1 Comment

Is taxonomy dying? The science of describing, naming and classifying living things may be on the verge of extinction. This rather sobering topic was found on the Business Mirror in their article, "Taxonomy, a dying profession." Fewer students each year are taking taxonomy as a course and the high-paying professions are overshadowing it as a career-choice. What happens when we have no more taxonomist? Before a species can be protected, it must be identified and classified.

Comprehensive Classification Builds Solid Taxonomies

By Melody Smith|July 26th, 2013|News, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Comprehensive Classification Builds Solid Taxonomies

Developing a classification system organized into conceptually similar categories can help users gain a better understanding of the taxonomy subject area. For instance, a recently developed taxonomy on communication interventions to improve childhood vaccination is expected to provide these outcomes: understanding the relationships between different types of communication interventions; facilitating conceptual mapping of these interventions; clarifying the key purposes and features of interventions to aid implementation and evaluation; and identifying areas where evidence is strong and where there are gaps.

Setting It Up For Success

By Melody Smith|July 24th, 2013|indexing, News, search, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Setting It Up For Success

Recently, Coveo announced that its advanced search application, Coveo for Salesforce, is now available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange. This product enables instant indexing of Salesforce Knowledge, SharePoint Online (Beta Connector) and Chatter Answers.

Creating a Beautiful Thesaurus

By Melody Smith|July 22nd, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Creating a Beautiful Thesaurus

As a 35-year-old company, Access Innovations has produced more than 200 original thesauri, and we are currently working on more thesauri. Although there are standards for thesauri to kind of give us ground rules, we change and we do things differently depending on the needs of the client. The one rule that remains constant for us is this: A thesaurus must always reflect the collection that will be indexed with the thesaurus.

How Related Are You?

By Melody Smith|July 22nd, 2013|News, Taxonomy, Term lists|Comments Off on How Related Are You?

I have a confession to make. I do not like sports. I do not watch sports. I know almost next to nothing about sports.

Choose Carefully

By Melody Smith|July 16th, 2013|News, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Choose Carefully

Semantria has announced an open source plug-in for WordPress to assist bloggers, writers, and authors in streamlining their publication processes. This interesting news was found on PRWeb in their article, “Semantria Announces an Innovative Open Source Plug-in for WordPress.”

Is Taxonomy the Oldest Profession?

By Melody Smith|July 15th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Is Taxonomy the Oldest Profession?

I recently came across a reference to taxonomy as “the oldest profession”. Could it be? Intrigued, I g**gled and discovered that Dr. Joel Walker Hedgpeth had given an entire talk on the subject in 1961, as the Eleventh Annual University of the Pacific Faculty Research Lecture.

New Partnership to Address Big Data

By Melody Smith|July 15th, 2013|News, Taxonomy|Comments Off on New Partnership to Address Big Data

Smartlogic and eTouch Systems have announced a partnership to deliver enterprise content management and search solutions. The partnership grew out of a two-year project with NASA that improved the space agency's findability of their content.