Posts Tagged ‘Taxonomy’
Taxonomy of What?
This interesting and somewhat alternative taxonomy fell on my radar today and I couldn’t resist. Humor me. It is Friday, after all.
Read MoreHometown Memories Online
I was reading my hometown paper today online. I am from a small town in Seymour, Indiana. In fact, “the small town” referred to in John Mellencamp’s so-named 80’s hit. The leading story was about digitizing records to make search work faster and with more comprehensive results. These deja vu moments almost surprise me in a very pleasing sort of way. It is like the universe is saying, “you made the right choices.”
Read MoreSome Thoughts on Vocabulary Control
A large part of what we work on in taxonomy development is vocabulary control. Our classification of knowledge involves designing controlled vocabularies and getting them into a form that we can use many, many times. We also have to do some linguistic analysis of the data to make sure that our terms are working correctly.
Read MoreM.A.I. (Machine-Aided Indexer) Selected as a KMWorld 2013 Trend-Setting Product of the Year
Access Innovations, Inc., leader in digital data organization and creator of the Data Harmony software suite, is proud to announce the inclusion of M.A.I.™ (Machine-Aided Indexer) in the KMWorld 2013 list of Trend-Setting Products. M.A.I. provides knowledge management solutions to organize information resources, based on a well-built and systematically applied taxonomy or thesaurus. The software…
Read MoreA Different Perspective
What is better than one interesting and slightly humorous taxonomy? Two, you say? How about three?
Read MoreTaxonomy is Gray
From the time of Plato, philosophers have been outlining the world as they saw it and they truly built an outline; they truly built a taxonomy of the world as they saw it. The way we perceive some field, or reality in general, is our own philosophy. If we look at the world through these lenses we see it one way; we look at the world through a different set of lenses, we see it absolutely differently. That is important to realize when building a thesaurus, because people are thinking of a field in one specific way or another.
Read MoreDocument Management with Solid Support
BMI Imaging Systems will be demonstrating a variety of document and records management solutions that increase the efficiency of government and corporate record keeping processes at the Las Vegas, Nevada Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) 2013 conference.
Read MoreMy 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?”
Read MoreWhy 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.
Read MoreA Dying Profession?
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.
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