Taxonomy – Page 67

Different Views of Your Taxonomy

By Melody Smith | August 27, 2012

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

By Melody Smith | August 22, 2012 |

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 Melody Smith | August 13, 2012

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 Melody Smith | August 6, 2012

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 Melody Smith | July 30, 2012

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!

Expert Webinar Series Looks at Governance Plans

By Melody Smith | July 24, 2012

Concept Searching will continue their 2012 Expert Webinar Series as their fifth installment addresses how to maximize investment in taxonomy and metadata design with SharePoint.

General Approaches to Creating a Taxonomy

By Melody Smith | July 23, 2012

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.

Security in SharePoint

By Melody Smith | July 17, 2012 |

HiSoftware Inc. has received Corporate Integrity’s GRC Technology Innovation Award, recognizing HiSoftware Security Sheriff™ SP as a governance, regulatory, and compliance solution on the cutting edge of the industry. Digital Journal brought this topic to our attention in their article, “HiSoftware Security Sheriff SP Recognized as a Leading GRC Technology Solution.” The product is designed…

Metadata Focus and Depth

By Melody Smith | July 16, 2012

A taxonomy provides a way to describe content. It is a source of conceptual descriptions for filling the subject metadata field in database records. When you look at a metadata schema, regardless of who built it, there is some field or element specified for the description of the concept represented in the item. It might be called the subject, descriptor, keyword, or something else. Dublin Core is one of the well-known metadata schemas. (To my mind it is not fully a standard; even though you will find my name on the standard for Z39.84, I still think it is just a guideline.)

Maintaining Your Creation

By Melody Smith | July 12, 2012

There is always talk about developing taxonomies – the process, the standards, etc. But a major part of a dynamic taxonomy and healthy document management systems is the maintenance required for taxonimies.