Taxonomy

Testing, Maintaining, and Implementing Your Taxonomy

By |September 3rd, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, search, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Testing, Maintaining, and Implementing Your Taxonomy

Once you’ve developed a taxonomy, of course you want to use it. And before using it, you want (or should want) to test it. And, of course, the use is two ways. You can apply it to the records, for indexing, and you can use it for search, too; both of those applications are use tests at first, and can serve as use tests again for maintenance of the taxonomy. Once you get into the maintenance phase, you have to be able to edit and otherwise change lots of parts of the terms. You might change the status of the term itself, what it is called; for example, you could change the primary term that you use and put some other word in as the non-preferred term. You might want to delete or add a relationship. Of course, you want to add new terms. You might want to move the branches around. All of these things are part of routine taxonomy maintenance.

Strong Taxonomies Improve Findability

By |August 31st, 2012|News, Standards, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Strong Taxonomies Improve Findability

Zenya has released multiple updates to their keyword platform, which results in improving the clients control to leverage keyword data and eventually their marketing success. Their approach to keyword generation includes a database of more than 1.4 billion keywords, including 600 million categorized by searcher intent.

Access Innovations Announces Free Live Discovery Tour of Data Harmony Software Suite

By |August 30th, 2012|Access Insights, News, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Access Innovations Announces Free Live Discovery Tour of Data Harmony Software Suite

Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in the data management industry, will present a live Discovery Tour of the Data Harmony software suite Tuesday, September 18, 2012, at 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

Different Views of Your Taxonomy

By |August 27th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Different Views of Your Taxonomy

With the right software or programming, you can produce different views of your taxonomy or thesaurus. The more you can produce the better. Read more to learn more about the various possibilities.

Investing in Taxonomies

We have written many times about the massive amount of data being created in this digital era. One additional problem in this chaotic whirlwind is the naming by random employees or users of the data. This inconsistent approach makes it difficult to locate and retrieve critical files once they are saved into the hodgepodge naming system.

Organizing Your Taxonomy Terms

By |August 13th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy, Term lists|Comments Off on Organizing Your Taxonomy Terms

Once you have a tentative list of terms for your taxonomy-to-be, it can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you have thousands of terms. (In scientific and technical fields, a typical taxonomy might have 5,000-10,000 terms.) How to start dealing with them all? A good first step is to organize the information into main categories. Choose some logical main areas, and don’t be too concerned up front about whether or not the areas or the initial wordings are exactly what you’ll ultimately want them to be. You’re just roughing things out at this stage. Then use those main areas as buckets, and dump the more specific terms into those buckets.

Selecting Terms for Your Taxonomy

By |August 6th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Selecting Terms for Your Taxonomy

When you select the terms, you can select them from all those standard sources that might be available to you, like these: Existing taxonomies, thesauri, and classification schemes; Encyclopedias, lexicons, dictionaries, and glossaries; Books and journals, and their indexes; Databases; and Annual reviews and surveys. Also scan the literature in general; not just your literature but the literature of other publishers. I would encourage you to watch the international literature. A tremendous amount of what is happening these days is happening outside the United States. We tend to take a rather parochial view of what is happening in our own field and knowledge organization systems. I would say that there is more happening in Europe than in the United States at the moment. They are way ahead of us in actually getting taxonomic implementations done and pushing the envelopes for thinking. So, those of us in non-European countries need to need to pay attention to what is happening in Europe.

Sports & Taxonomies: More Related Than You May Think

By |July 30th, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Sports & Taxonomies: More Related Than You May Think

Earlier this year, you may recall, we demonstrated the far-reaching and all-encompassing nature of taxonomies when we highlighted the taxonomical approach sportswriters apply to making preseason baseball predictions in Of Taxonomies, Biology, and Moneyball. With the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympic Games, we could not pass up the opportunity to once again share some insights into two of our favorite things—sports and taxonomies!

General Approaches to Creating a Taxonomy

By |July 23rd, 2012|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on General Approaches to Creating a Taxonomy

There are several ways to create a taxonomy. One is from the existing data, which is my preferred method. You can also do it as an intellectual outline of the discipline, thinking about what ought to be included in this discipline. That is what the monks did many years ago in their cold towers on those mountainsides. Few of us have that luxury. Most of us will be dealing with a specific corpus of information.