Book: The Accidental Taxonomist

The Accidental Taxonomist by Heather Hedden is available for preorder at a reduced price.


From the publisher: "Drawing on numerous real-world examples, Hedden explains how to create terms and relationships, select taxonomy management software, design taxonomies for human versus automated indexing, manage enterprise taxonomy projects, and adapt taxonomies to various user interfaces. The result is a practical and essential guide for information professionals who need to effectively create or manage taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri. "

Heather presents sessions and offers workshops at many conferences and has published numerous articles. See her website Hedden Information Management for upcoming presentations and published articles on the Web.

Semantic Digital Libraries

There are a couple of discoveries from this posting in the SLA LinkedIn Community (Apr 6)


1) Book on Semantic Digital Libraries - Improving Usability of Information Discovery with Semantic and Social Services by Sebastian Kruk

"This book is based on Sebastian's PhD thesis. He reviews architectures, abstract models, metadata standards and various technologies for building digital library management systems. He derives requirements for advanced digital libraries and proposes an architecture model and a set of ontologies for semantic digital libraries. "

Abstract, outline (table of contents), and referenced links are available at the book page.

2) Posting was at the Semantic Digital Libraries Community - this blog by Kruk follows digital library systems, describing them as "an outcome of the synergy between digital libraries, the Semantic Web, and social networking"

Site has several presentations, such as this one on Digital Libraries of the Future: Use of Semantic Web and Social Bookmarking to support E-Learning in Digital Libraries.

Data Harmony moves to cloud

Achieving Data Harmony in the Cloud, Newsbreaks (April 1)

Work with Access Innovations' suite of tools for thesaurus building, thesaurus maangement, and indexing in the cloud.

"Ven Eman continued, "We're not doing this to be trendy. We believe that SaaS and cloud computing are reliable and ready for customers now. By making our software available over the internet either using a client or a browser, we are making it more convenient for our customers to use. They no longer need to purchase up front and then find a server, IT support, etc. They can begin using products such as Data Harmony and its suite of taxonomy management tools including Thesaurus Master, MAIstro, and XIS immediately," he explained."

Thesaurus Management - Semantic Web

This looks interesting - PoolParty, a company in Austria, has developed software for creating and managing a thesaurus. It supports SKOS and can be used to analyze text and do "semantic indexing".

PoolParty is a thesaurus management system and a SKOS editor for the Semantic Web including text analysis functionalities and linked data capabilities. The system helps to build and maintain multilingual thesauri providing a simple user interface and a couple of semantic services. PoolParty can be used to implement semantic search or can be integrated into existing systems like CMS, DMS or Wikis.

There are several screencasts and screenshots to demo the product. Registered users have access to a full demo. As well there is this very useful page on Application Scenarios and Use Cases.

Sharepoint and taxonomies

Earley and Associates has a webinar on using taxonomies with Sharepoint coming up on March 30,2010. This is part of a "free vendor showcase" series.

Optimizing Your SharePoint Deployment
Developing a complex controlled vocabulary is a large time investment. A hierarchical taxonomy is a necessity for users to navigate and find information, but it's a loss if you are not able to implement effectively in SharePoint.

Learn how to make search more successful and leverage taxonomy and ontologies in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007 with Semaphore in our next Vendor Showcase: SharePoint Search.

Date: Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Time: 1:00 - 2:00 Eastern Time
Cost: Free

Search Harmony

Taxonomy enhanced search software at Perfect Search Corporation.

"Search Harmony is taxonomy enhanced search that includes hierarchical browse navigation, automatic query completion using taxonomy terms and their synonyms, contextual presentation of related terms to broaden the search and narrower terms to refine the search, spell check, "more like these" sets, and recursive searches. Based on Access Innovations' MAIstro automatic indexing and thesaurus software suite, it provides well formed data and highly accurate search results. Used on top of search software, it provides the best of breed in recall, precision, and relevance searching. "

Time for Enterprise Tagging

Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work? By Stephanie Lemieux, Earley and Associates, User Interface Engineering (Mar 1 2010)

"But just what is social tagging in the enterprise: a cheap solution to information organization in difficult economic times, giving people the tools they love at home to use at work, or just a faddish attempt to incorporate "cool web 2.0 stuff" into the enterprise context?"

Explains what tagging in enterprise context would mean and names some benefits.

Semantic Technology Uses for Financial Services

Semantics in Financial Services Presentation, Daniela Barbosa Chitchatting about Information Delivery,(Jan 18)

Semantic web technology is sweeping through organizations as more and more companies show how it can be used.

Here Daniela Barbosa points us to a presentation done at a meetup in San Francisco on Semantics in Financial Services with David Newman, a Senior Architect in the Enterprise Architecture group at Wells Fargo Bank/Wachovia.

Categorization, ontologies, data schemas are some of the parts.

Semantics in Financial Services -David Newman

View more presentations from Peter Berger.

The slideshow goes through

+ benefits
+ semantic technology: ontology, basic principles, basic concepts
+ some providers and adopters
+ use cases
+ recommended books and journals.

H5 EDGE Classifier

H5 Introduces H5 EDGE™ Classifier for Enterprise Information Governance, press release, H5 (Jan 27, 2009)

"SAN FRANCISCO – January 27, 2010 – H5, a leading provider of automated information retrieval products and services, today announced the availability of the H5 EDGE™ Classifier, the first of its Electronic Data Governance Engine (EDGE) products for the enterprise. Developed in response to the growing market need for more effective information classification technologies and client demand for H5’s accurate assessments behind the firewall, H5 EDGE Classifier gives companies the ability to make highly accurate, automated decisions on information using their existing technology infrastructures."

Schemas and vocubalaries

Here are two resources that may help people in using schemas to build taxonomies.

Schemaweb.info/ - " SchemaWeb is a directory of RDF schemas expressed in the RDFS, OWL and DAML+OIL schema languages. SchemaWeb is a place for developers and designers working with RDF. It provides a comprehensive directory of RDF schemas to be browsed and searched by human agents and also an extensive set of web services to be used by software agents that wish to obtain real-time schema information whilst processing RDF data. "

Vocab.org/ - " A URI space for vocabularies"

Thanks to SLA Taxonomy Wiki