Autonomy Offers Automatic Classification and Taxonomy Generation
May 7, 2012
Conceptualizing the processes and methods behind the storage and organization of data in our current age ruled by unstructured content and meta-tags can prove overwhelming. We found a great source of information from Autonomy, which explains their offering of Automatic Classification and Taxonomy Generation.
With their eye on functionality, IDOL’s classification solutions help users to circumvent issues that have arisen in a time of exponential data growth.
In addition to Taxonomy Libraries and Automatic Categorization and Channels, the Autonomy Collaborative Classifier is included. Their website clearly delineates how these elements work.
The website states the following information regarding Taxonomy Libraries:
“Built by experienced knowledge engineers using best practices learned through hundreds of consulting engagements, Autonomy taxonomies let organizations rapidly deploy industry-standard taxonomies that can be combined with your corporate taxonomies or easily customized to meet company and industry-specific requirements. Each Autonomy taxonomy is based on industry standards, and built using IDOL’s conceptual analysis that provides the highest level of accuracy.”
There are a variety of taxonomies IDOL consists of ranging from biotechnology to financial services: a comprehensive solution, indeed. Overall, IDOL seems equipped to eradicate the need for time consuming intervention required in the past. But open source alternatives exist and should be considered by procurement teams.
Megan Feil, May 9, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
Exclusive Interview: Paul Doscher, President of Lucid Imagination
April 16, 2012
The Search Wizards Speak features Paul Doscher, the new president of Lucid Imagination. Mr. Doscher joined Lucid Imagination in December 2011. He had been president of Dassault Exalead USA prior to assuming the top spot at fast-growing, customer- and community-centric Lucid Imagination.
I spoke with Mr. Doscher when he was working for the Dassault Exalead organization. When he shifted to Lucid Imagination, I spoke with him about his views of open source search. After that brief initial conversation, I met again with Mr. Doscher and probed into his views about the impact open source search is having on traditional for-fee, proprietary search systems.
When I asked about the shift from proprietary search systems to open source search, he told me:
Today organizations need the flexibility to adapt and make changes. A proprietary solution may not permit the licensee to make enhancements. If a change is made, the proprietary search vendor may “own” the fix and will add that innovation to its core product. The licensee who created the fix gets nothing and may have had to pay for the right to innovate. As corporate information technology struggles to keep up with escalating business information demands and an ever increasing mountain of growing content of all types, open source search provides a cost effective and efficient way to develop applications to address the challenges and opportunities in today’s enterprise.
Mr. Doscher has strong views about how licensees of enterprise search systems have learned about costs, the time required to deploy a system, and the effort needed to keep a search system up and running. I asked him about Lucid Imagination’s approach to a search engagement. He said:
Our approach to an engagement is to listen to what our customers need, prepare an action plan, and then deliver. In a sense, our approach is the type of involvement that many software companies have stepped away from. We have an enthusiastic group of engineers and professionals who work with clients to meet their needs.
The full text of the interview appears on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. For more information about Lucid Imagination’s open source search system, you will want to explore the company’s Web site and its blog. In addition, an interview with one of the founders of Lucid Imagination, Marc Krellenstein, and with Eric Gries, a former executive at Lucid Imagination, is available in the Beyond Search archives.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Taxonomy for Tax Fraud
April 14, 2012
As the buzzword craziness shifts from taxonomy to big data, there is an interesting spin on a taxonomy. Navigate to “Book Cooking Guide”. (The headline alone will alert the MBAs that this is a write up from the Economist newspaper which sure looks like a magazine to me.) The write up presents some tips on fudging the books for the purpose of tax fraud, snookering stakeholders, and other MBA style activities. Here’s the passage I noted:
The IMF has a helpful laundry list of ways to keep sneaky politicians in check. Accounting measures should follow the movement of economic value, not cash, so that delaying pay packets until next year (or retirement) has no effect. Governments should publish net worth, which encompasses assets and liabilities, so taking over pension schemes is less appealing. Budgets should forecast up to 50 years out, so the full effects of policy are clearly seen.
Are economic methods satisfying, even reassuring?
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Iowa Government Gets a Digital Dictionary Provided By Access
April 7, 2012
How did we get by without the invention of the quick search to look up information? We used to use dictionaries, encyclopedias, and a place called the library. Access Innovations, Inc. has brought the Iowa Legislature General Assembly into the twenty-first century.
The write-up “Access Innovations, Inc. Creates Taxonomy for Iowa Code, Administrative Code and Acts” tells us the data management industry leader has built a thesaurus that allows the Legislature to search its library of proposed laws, bills, acts, and regulations. Users can also add their unstructured data to the thesaurus. Access used their Data Harmony software to provide subscription-based delivery and they built the thesaurus on MAIstro.
“The project differed from typical index and thesaurus creation because the Iowa Legislative Services Agency needed to maintain its existing codes from each back-of-the-book index, rather than starting from scratch and creating new codes. One reference alone, the Blue Index, included 2,300 index terms. To create the thesaurus, Access looked at different methods to apply to each term according to the existing references, tied preferred terms to the existing codes, and added related terms to the preferred terms. The codes covered previous legislation dating as far back as 1953 to legislation through 2010. Also, the custom taxonomy was built with only four levels in order to meet Iowa Legislative Services’ navigation requirements. Typically, thesauri are not limited by a specified number of levels.”
The new legal thesaurus makes it much easier to find new laws and their changes instead of having to browse through pages of book. Access Innovations hopes their project for the Iowa Legislature General Assembly will encourage other government bodies to turn their libraries over to them for indexing. Not only would that make it easier for politicians and their staff to conduct research, maybe it could improve the political situation in the US. Making part of a job easier tends to make people happy.
Whitney Grace, April 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SoSlang Crowdsources a Dictionary
March 20, 2012
Here’s a surprising and interesting approach to dictionaries: have users build their own. SoSlang allows anyone to add a slang term and its definition. Beware, though, this site is not for everyone. Entries can be salty. R-rated, even. You’ve been warned.
The site’s About page presents this description:
“So Slang is an un-complicated online slang dictionary which is contributed and edited by thousands of people online just like you. Unlike formal dictionaries, you can add your own meaning to millions of words.
“With more than 6 million definitions, So Slang is the biggest hub for street definitions of each and every word in the dictionary. These definitions are added by people all over the world wide web. If you’d like to add a definition, click here.”
Providing easy-to-understand definitions and lots of examples are emphasized. As users add definitions, though, the old ones are not removed; this means some entries have a long list of conflicting definitions. I suppose that’s the nature of slang, though.
If you are even somewhat easily offended, stay away. However, if you’re boggled by a slang expression you overheard, this may be the place to turn.
Stephen E. Arnold, March 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Sharepoint Accessibility Much Deeper than Security
March 7, 2012
One of the many issues facing IT departments wrestling with SharePoint is how to manage information in regard to access without tripping on security permissions at every turn. A recent article on SharePoint Semantics, Managing User Profile Service Application Proxies in Microsoft SharePoint, provides an answer on how to do just that and addresses another common problem inherent among SharePoint users.
To solve the problem of information access and company security the article refers to an informative blog post on ShareMuch Blog which remedies the situation with a few quick tweaks. ShareMuch Blog is quoted as offering the solution:
“In the scenario from my last post, we use the primary My Site for intranet users; then we have secondary My Site for extranet users or customers. Depending on your policies you might want to lock out those two groups of My Sites from being accessed by two sets of users groups as new My Sites get provisioned. After all, you don’t want to run around and change security permissions on the newly created site collection every time.”
As for another problem with a quick fix SharePoint Semantics blogger, Ken Toth, brings up the often embarrassingly little developed search and navigation application of SharePoint within an enterprise. He recommends incorporating software such as Smartlogic’s Semaphore Search Application Framework which gives SharePoint the little boost it needs to be more user-friendly. Without adequate search within the framework of a company’s SharePoint platform information is neither accessible nor usable making it useless. Before worrying about security and accessibility data must be searchable and sharable, something with which Smartlogic can help.
Quite surprising is the Wikipedia “signal” about the Ontoprise Wikipedia entry. Smartlogic has a Wikipedia entry but no exclamation points. (A happy quack to the ArnoldIT researchers who called this to my addled brain.)
Here’s the banner for Ontoprise, an organization operating in Germany.
Wikipedia is not without flaws. However, this type of warning communications to me that something somewhere is not kosher. We are monitoring the situation in our Overflight taxonomy service.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Constructing User-Friendly SharePoint Platforms
March 6, 2012
Making sense of the SharePoint platform can, at times, become a burden. Disappointed managers expect newly adopted SharePoint software to be finished applications and when it is not they turn to overtaxed, anxiety-riddled IT guys expecting them to produce a miracle. At least that’s the current situation in many companies according to a recent SharePoint Semantics article, Enterprise SharePoint Surprises are Not Fun: Plan Ahead for Your Successful Deployment.
While SharePoint undoubtedly can help large organizations manage data and share files it is not ready for employee use right out of the box. With enough time, effort and money a company can manipulate SharePoint to become just about anything they need it to be. For most companies time, effort and money are in short supply making the need for SharePoint solutions that much greater. For that, explains the article, other compatible programs must be involved.
SharePoint Semantics’ passes along this suggestion:
“One part of your collaboration and information management strategy should be the Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform from Smartlogic. Semaphore’s search and navigation enhancements mean that SharePoint end users can easily access their valuable information assets due to precise information classification not found in out of the box SharePoint.”
By developing strategies in how to best utilize the SharePoint platform before it is unveiled company-wide businesses can avoid the inevitable headaches which will accompany SharePoint placed into the hands of untrained management. By adopting Smartlogic software, or a similar product, companies can release SharePoint more fully developed to handle the needs of employees across an enterprise which is, ultimately, what SharePoint aims to do. We note that the Smartlogic organization does not have a Wikipedia multiple issues “exclamation graphic” as Wikipedia alleges Ontoprise to possess.
Is this exclamation point a semantic graphic? Puzzling and slightly off putting.
Catherine Lamsfuss, March 6, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Ontoprise GmbH: Multiple Issues Says Wikipedia
March 3, 2012
Now Wikipedia is a go-to resource for Google. I heard from one of my colleagues that Wikipedia turns up as the top hit on a surprising number of queries. I don’t trust Wikipedia, but I don’t trust any encyclopedia produced by volunteers including volunteers. Volunteers often participate in a spoofing fiesta.
Note: I will be using this symbol when I write about subjects which trigger associations in my mind about use of words, bound phrases, and links to affect how results may be returned from Exalead.com, Jike.com, and Yandex.ru, among other modern Web indexing services either supported by government entities or commercial organizations.
I was updating my list of Overflight companies. We have added five companies to a new Overflight service called, quite imaginatively, Taxonomy Overflight. We have added five firms and are going through the process of figuring out if the outfits are in business or putting on a vaudeville act for paying customers.
The first five companies are:
We will be adding to the Taxonomy Overflight another group of companies on March 4, 2012. I have not yet decided how to “score” each vendor. For enterprise search Overflight, I use a goose method. Click here for an example: Overflight about Autonomy. Three ducks. Darned good.
I wanted to mention one quite interesting finding. We came across a company doing business as Ontoprise. The firm’s Web site is www.ontoprise.de. We are checking to see which companies have legitimate Web sites, no matter how sparse.
We noted that the Wikipedia entry for Ontoprise carried this somewhat interesting “warning”:
The gist of this warning is to give me a sense of caution, if not wariness, with regard to this company which offers products which delivered “ontologies.” The company’s research is called “Ontorule”, which has a faintly ominous sound to me. If I look at the naming of products from such firms as Convera before it experienced financial stress, Convera’s product naming was like science fiction but less dogmatic than Ontoprise’s language choice. So I cannot correlate Convera and Ontoprise on other than my personal “semantic”baloney detector. But Convera went south in a rather unexpected business action.
Working Towards a Budget Friendly Military
March 2, 2012
There is no shortage of military supporters, and articles that applaud these men and women for their sacrifices to protect the United States and its interest. However, according to the WAND Action Center article “WAND and the Military Budget – What We Are Up Against” the United States military desperately needs a budget overhaul. “There is only one way to get the changes WAND believes are necessary: an informed citizenry. U.S. citizens are deeply disturbed about our economic problems, rising inequalities, and the perception that our country is falling behind, yet haven’t made the link between that and the devastating costs of our military.”
WAND believes that being a major military power and protecting other nations is of little importance if we cannot handle our own problems at home. This is a somewhat unusual yet interesting view of the military and politics and the battle lines that some groups have drawn. It seems that some believe even the US Military needs an allowance.
Interesting approach to marketing taxonomies.
April Holmes,March 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Heat in SharePoint Semantics February Feb 3 – Feb 9
February 14, 2012
Last week, SharePoint Semantics delivered several incredibly noteworthy and informative pieces that I would like to share with search enthusiasts.
The first is “Microsoft SharePoint FAST Search and Visual Best Bets: Better Together.” While this title may be a bit of a tongue twister, it shares an article that explains why SharePoint end users should opt in for FS4SP for Visual Best Bets.
the article states:
“But why go the extra mile for a separate file, or opt in for FS4SP for this feature? The Best Bet web part support the showing of keywords and keyword definitions. Keyword definitions are formatted as HTMLl. And a definition with html formatting is in effect a Visual Best Bet. (If you have more than one Visual Best Bet you want to assign to the keyword you would have to add them all to the same html for this to work.”
When using SharePoint there are many details that can be overlooked if you do not do you proper research. In “Know Your Microsoft SharePoint Calendar Options: Calendar View or Calendar List” we learn some useful advice regarding your best option when choosing between a Calendar (Calendar Lists) by using a Calendar template, or a Calendar View of an existing list.
writer Ken Toth states:
“The author points out that he chose to do the Calendar View option because it allows the ability to schedule dates in the future, gives all contributors the ability to view and edit calendar entries without special permissions, connects with existing lists of documents, is easy to use, and involves minimal work.”
In “Quick and Easy Steps to Create a Basic Microsoft SharePoint Survey” we learn how to create a survey using out of the box functionality. The post points users to an article that provides a straightforward, and easy to solution.
The articles that were highlighted this week, point readers to some user friendly ways that they can tackle SharePoint hurdles on their own. For those who are interested in another quick fix, check out the Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform from Smartlogic. It’s efficient and does all the leg work for you.
Jasmine Ashton, February 14, 2012
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