Taxodiary – thesaurus

Outlining Slices of Knowledge

By Melody Smith|August 5th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured|Comments Off on Outlining Slices of Knowledge

As most readers of this blog know, a thesaurus is a way to categorize the knowledge of certain fields or specified combinations thereof. All thesauri are built for specific fields or topical areas. This does not prevent a thesaurus from being able to cover a wide range of knowledge, especially if it’s multidisciplinary within, for instance, the area of academic subjects as a whole. (If the latter is the case, we might well have much more trouble with disambiguation than we would have in more specialized thesauri.)

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.

Points of Knowledge

By Melody Smith|May 27th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on 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.

A Short History of Thesauri

By Melody Smith|May 20th, 2013|Access Insights, Featured|Comments Off on A Short History of Thesauri

We know of one Sanskrit thesaurus, the Amarakosha (Treasury or Dictionary of Amara), written by Buddhist scholar Amara Simha around 375 or 400 AD. Interestingly, it was written in verse. (The only other terminology in verse I can think of offhand is the one-L lama one by Ogden Nash, but I don’t think that bears comparison to the Amarakosha.)

Connecting Taxonomies

By Melody Smith|July 11th, 2011|Access Insights, Featured, Taxonomy|Comments Off on Connecting Taxonomies

I’ve been asked if taxonomies can be connected. The thinking was, if these taxonomies are standardized, or at least mostly standardized, it seems that there should be a way that taxonomies can be connected in various organizational systems.

A New Thesaurus for Online Scholarly Publications

By Melody Smith|August 3rd, 2010|Access Insights, News, reference, Term lists|Comments Off on A New Thesaurus for Online Scholarly Publications

Access Innovations, Inc. and the American Institute of Physics announce a new thesaurus for online scholarly publications that allows automatic indexing of peer-reviewed articles and enhanced online publication search.