Quality Takes Experience
There is a webinar called, "Taxonomy – The User’s perspective", being offered on Wednesday, July 24 at 11:00 a.m. CET, presented by the Office of Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) classification expert Thom Clark.
There’s Indexing and There’s Indexing: Report from the American Society for Indexing Conference
The American Society for Indexing may be a little known group to most reading a blog dedicated to taxonomy work. Yet we share a focus on making content accessible, albeit through different strategies. The American Society of Indexers (ASI) was established in 1968 to promote the work of back-of-book indexers and facilitate their interaction. In 2008 it was renamed to the American Society for Indexing with the stated purpose “to promote excellence in indexing, and to serve indexers and others concerned with indexing.” The name change reflected a broadening of scope, including taxonomy work and coinciding with the establishment of the Taxonomy SIG (special interest group). ASI’s training course even includes a taxonomy construction module. The expansion is a response to the mushrooming of electronic content and increasing need for simplifying access to online materials. Yet, for the society focused on “indexing,” taxonomic indexing is called tagging and has seemed an afterthought at best. Indeed, few database indexers attend conferences, and there is little mention of their activity.
Choose the Right Tools
Version 1.0 of TokuMX, a version of MongoDB that has its storage layer replaced with Tokutek's storage engine, has been released.
Taxonomy by All
Wikipedia is often disparaged as a reliable source because anyone can edit any entry at any time. So given that history, how credible would a taxonomy be that was built by crowdsourcing? Some interesting information about one such attempt was found on The Daily, a publication of the University of Washington, in their article, “Playing to the crowd.
Outlining the World (and Its Parts)
As we have seen, there were a lot of early philosophers who outlined the world as they saw it. While that’s an ambitious undertaking (especially for academic trailblazers), they truly built an outline; they truly built a taxonomy of the world as they saw it.
Predictability is Not a Bad Thing
We know that building a taxonomy is not easy. It requires research, building of terms, identifying criteria, and the list goes on and on. And we all know that it doesn’t always go smoothly and in predictable order.
Points of Knowledge
To deal with a large body of knowledge, we need to localize and organize it somehow. Where that knowledge is located, or where and how it is organized, or the system by which it is identified and perhaps indexed, might be called the points of knowledge. And certainly, databases connected to and/or indexed with knowledge organization systems represent points of knowledge.
Trekkie Taxonomy
You know my fascination with unique applications of taxonomies. What you don't know is how much of a sci-fi fan my husband is. So if I failed to report on this little gem, well, I might have to sleep on your couch for awhile. As the third story in a multi-part series on taxonomy and speciation, this look at the infamous tricorder and how it relates to taxonomies, is an interesting read.