Introduction to taxonomies and thesauri

LLRX has picked up Gail Rayburn's presentation on Taxonomies and Thesauri to the Washington DC SLA chapter. (Nov 1, 2011). It's a very good primer to the terms and structure, and a guide to how to go about building one. Includes a brief introduction to ontologies as well.

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2011 Presentations

Presentations from Taxonomy Boot Camp, Oct 31 to Nov 1,2011, are available at http://www.taxonomybootcamp.com/2011/presentations.aspxhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

New Directions by Don Turnbull takes us on a tour of organizing data and information emotively (by mood), for the individual - the personal taxonomy, behavioral patterns, judgement - ratings and permissions, and lastly, the one we know a bit more about, semantics and clustering.

Very interesting example of working with taxonomies in the presentation on Rebuilding Taxonomy Warehouse as an Ontology from Dave Clarke at Synaptica International.

Gary Carlson has good advice and amusing examples in Avoiding the Autobiographical Taxonomy

Other well known presenters include Heather Hedden, Patrick Lambe, Seth Earley, Tom Reamy.

Taxonomy Management Tools

New Advisory Paper: Taxonomy Management Tools, Angela Guess, Semantic Web (Nov 17)

Costs money but could be useful -- "New Taxonomy Management Advisory Paper from The Real Story Group(PRWEB) November 15, 2011

The Real Story Group just released a new Advisory Paper: "Taxonomy Management Tools: A Comparative Evaluation." Taxonomy management tools have become a key player in end-to-end architectures for tackling content organization challenges, but the tools vary substantially in approach, and the marketplace as a whole remains somewhat immature, according to The Real Story Group, an independent analyst firm that evaluates web and enterprise technologies."

Taxonomy and Metadata Uppermost

Taxonomy and Metadata and Findability Influence Traditional Roles, Theresa Putkey, KeyPoint Usability Consulting (Oct 17)

A view from the trenches perhaps --

"As an information architect, I work with companies who are struggling with information organization. They recognize the need to put their information into a content management system (CMS) to ensure digital information or digital surrogates for physical objects can be found. As a consultant, companies hire me to help build metadata and taxonomy structures."

US National Agricultural Library Agricultural Thesaurus

http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif, Press release from USDA (Oct 11, 2011)

The Agricultural Thesaurus from the National Agricultural Library (US) is fully available online.

" It provides standard terms in both English and Spanish that can be used for indexing to improve the retrieval of information."http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Advances in text analysis

Meaning-Based Computing: Text Analysis Takes a Great Leap Forward by Terence K. Huwe, Information Today (Sept / OCt 2011)

Meaning-based computing (MBC) is finally getting its due.

"MBC unites the power of modern search protocols with recent advances in text pattern recognition, language-context analysis, and even “sentiment analysis”— which sounds somewhat mysterious. The cumulative advances in MBC are enabling computers to make far more useful inferences about the meaning of communications, even as language usage evolves. Although MBC has been used over the past 8 years with considerable success, the synergy of recent advances has gained wider attention. "

MBC will aid, not supplant, the creation and use of taxonomies for access.

"Taxonomy: It will still matter. The contemporary web is a matrix of artifacts and living documents that have their own “social life,” as Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s John Seely Brown famously said in the book, The Social Life of Information, which he co-authored with Paul Duguid. HTML5 and the semantic web will add embedded functionalities that further support the development of taxonomies, ontologies, and crowdsourcing techniques to tag useful resources. Meaning-based computing will not supplant these features, although it will likely introduce powerful new ways to look inside document wrappers and parse the evolving meaning of everyday language. If so, then MBC presents digital content managers with another new opportunity to improve access and retrieval. "

Browsable facets

Categories, Facets—and Browsable Facets? by Jaimie Sirovich, UX Matters (Aug 23)

For people designing taxonomies for e-commerce sites, this article could be the ticket. It's about creating a browsable facet - a situation where facets (attributes) can intersect with a taxonomy of categories. Product search can have this problem - where the structure is based on brand (Sony, Panasonic etc) and it is difficult to filter by facet.

The Synaptica Taxonomy Warehouse

Synaptica has re-vamped its informational website at www.taxonomywarehouse.com. "Taxonomy Warehouse is a free online resource that has answered millions of enquiries about taxonomies".

From the e-newsletter:

"This year we imported all of the content from the old Taxonomy Warehouse website into a Synaptica system and re-engineered the directory to become a semantically rich ontology. When you visit Taxonomy Warehouse, all the content and functionality you will see is dynamically generated from Synaptica. Besides providing the taxonomy community with lots of valuable content, we hope that the all-new Taxonomy Warehouse will provide a showcase for building and publishing ontologies. We invite you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep informed as we roll out additional content and features."

The Taxonomy Watch Blog is pleased and honoured to be listed in this database.

Online Course - Ontologies

Semisphere and Semantic Web offer a 4 week online course on Intro to Semantic Technologies, Linked Data, and Ontologies - starts October 17, 2011

Contents:

1. Semantic technologies
2. Linked data
3. Ontologies

Enterprise Search - vendors and trends

Stephen E Arnold often writes about search companies and is an expert on the industry. Pandia has summarized a few main points from his most recent e-book, Landscape of Enterprise Search.

Enterprise Search, Trends and Solutions

Note the new intelligence that is embedded in the new search products:
http://www2.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
"Search vendors and niche software specialists offer components than can assign index terms not contained in a source document.

The advantage of systems that assign metatags via “smart software” or via a combination of automatic systems and human subject matter experts is sometimes called “discovery”. The idea is that the interface displays related information or suggests documents that may help the user answer a question. "

Leading companies in this field are Autonomy, Endeca, Vivisimo, Exalead, Google and Microsoft.

The book is available for download for only $20 - sounds like a bargain to me -- http://www.pandia.com/enterprise-search/