Spotlight on Access Innovations Living Up to Name
May 14, 2013
New York-based print and digital educational content company, Triumph Learning, has struck up a partnership with taxonomy development leader Access Innovations, Inc. Together, they will be creating a new taxonomy designed to align standards-based instructional content for the k-1 education market. The news release, “Triumph Learning Partners with Access Innovations on Common Core Standards-Integrated Taxonomy,” explains more.
Content management can be a difficult challenge for companies like Triumph learning but Access Innovations facilitated a more efficient management system by developing and building taxonomy out of a structured vocabulary for math and English.
We learned about how the Common Core State Standards apply:
The Common Core State Standards provide concepts and terminology that Triumph Learning writers and editors can use to link pieces of content such as instruction and practice activities, as well as other supplemental material, to corresponding grade-level standards. ‘By using Access Innovations expertise we will be able to properly align our content for both teachers and students,’ said Aoife Dempsey, Chief Technology Officer at Triumph Learning.
For a company that has been around since 1978, Access Innovations truly lives up to their name. Their database and taxonomy creation capabilities and semantic integration technology stand out among others and it looks like their spotlight will continue to shine — especially now that they are involved in bolstering educational reform on a national level.
Megan Feil, May 14, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Taxonomy or Ontology
April 1, 2013
The WAND blog article “Common Taxonomy Questions: What is the difference between a Taxonomy and an Ontology?” attempts to clear up the misconception between taxonomy and ontology. The article details that these are two common words in the information management world but many people do not truly understand the difference.
“Taxonomy is a collection of terms that are connected by broader term, narrower term, related term, and synonym relationships.”
The article makes an interesting comparison. Taxonomy is a tree that has a parent/child relationship with terms and it usually covers a specific subject area. Taxonomies can be a valuable tool when adding structure/content to unstructured information, which makes the information more easily searchable. Multiple taxonomies can be used together as filters to help make the search experience more powerful and exact. Popular sites such as Amazon and Costco use this tool on their sites. When it comes to ontologies the author makes an interesting comparison.
“Ontologies can be thought of more like a web, with many different types of relationships between all concepts. Ontologies can have infinite number of relationships between concepts and it is easier to create relationships between concepts across different subject domains.”
Ontologies are handy for those who want a more sophisticated information model that could be valuable when doing advanced natural language processing or text analytics. Though the name of the system is WAND Product and Service Taxonomy believe it or not it is also an ontology. The blog provides a good distinction between ontology and taxonomy but then says that the WAND system is actually both, which makes one wonder how do you really distinguish the two. Looks like more questions than answers. Here we go again.
April Holmes, April 01, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Cause for Celebration
April 1, 2013
The best way to celebrate the successful completion of a project is with a celebration and no celebration is complete without a cake. Synaptica definitely knows how to throw a celebration party. According to the Synaptica Central piece “Elsevier Celebrates New Installation” Synaptica and Elsevier recently celebrated the successful completion of their software development project with a tasty cake.
“It is a pleasure when one of our customers has a specially decorated cake made to celebrate the successful deployment of their customized Synaptica taxonomy management software. The project, completed this month, was a collaboration between Synaptica and the content management team at Elsevier, Netherlands.”
Elsevier got its start with journal and book publishing but is also known for providing scientific, technical and medical information as well as various other products. Synaptica was started in 1995 and is owned by Trish Yancey and Dave Clarke. They are an industry leader in the taxonomy management and ontology software. Their software give users several key benefits such as increased relevance thanks to a synonym-rich indexing vocabulary and the ability to visualize taxonomies in a variety of both textual and graphical formats. Synaptica software can work in the enterprise world and has been integrated with several different third-party applications. In addition Synaptica is user friendly and can be set up in only a matter of minutes. Synaptica taxonomy software is used by a variety of organizations when it comes to their metadata management and information access applications. The company even received the “100 Companies that Matter” award. Looks like they definitely have a reason to celebrate.
April Holmes, April 01, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
DataFacet Video
February 15, 2013
DataFacet’s stream of news slowed in late 2012. The outfit seems to be quiet; what’s going on over there? While we wait for their next move, check out the interesting video on the DataFacet Web site, which effectively introduces their product. It begins with a good explanation of “taxonomy,” which might be useful to bookmark in case you need to define the term for someone unfamiliar with the field. The video goes on to show someone using parts of the DataFacet system, which gives a much better idea of what it does than any text explanation could. It’s set to a catchy tune, too.
The product description surrounding the video specifies:
DataFacet provides a taxonomy based data model for your enterprise’s unstructured information along with a sophisticated, yet easy to use, set of tools for applying the data model to your content.
It’s an easy three step process:
- Choose your foundation taxonomies from the DataFacet library of over 500 topic domains
- Customize your taxonomy with DataFacet Taxonomy Manager
- Tag your content with DataFacet Taxonomy Server
DataFacet is already available for the following search and content environments:
- Microsoft SharePoint 2010
- Oracle WebCenter Content
- Apache Solr and Lucene
- MarkLogic Server
- Exalead CloudView
- Coveo Enterprise Search
- Autonomy IDOL
- Less than 1 week turnaround for most custom platform integrations.
DataFacet is actually a joint project, built by taxonomists from WAND and Applied Relevance. Based in Denver, Colorado, WAND has been developing structured multi-lingual vocabularies since 1998. Their taxonomies have been put to good use in online search systems, ad-matching engines, B2B directories, product searches, and within enterprise search engines.
Applied Relevance offers automated tagging to help organizations contextualize their unstructured data. They have designed their user interface using cross-platform JavaScript and HTML5, which gives their application the flexibility to run in a browser, be embedded in a Web page, or be hosted in an Adobe Air desktop application.
Cynthia Murrell, February 15, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
WAND Partnership with Concept Searching Unveiled
January 2, 2013
A new partnership was revealed for WAND Inc recently. WAND is a developer of structured multi-lingual vocabularies. Digital Journal covered the story about the strategic partnership with Concept Searching in their article, “Concept Searching Selected as Founding Strategic Partner in the WAND Within Partnership Program.”
Concept Searching offers automatic semantic metadata generation, auto-classification, taxonomy management software. Because they have met the requirements from the new WAND Within program, they have been named one of the founding partners.
Additionally, smartStructures has emerged as a marketing collaboration between Concept Searching’s advanced technology platform, WAND Foundation Taxonomies, and industry expertise. These vertically aligned solutions will be available only from Concept Searching directly or from a set of certified partners.
The article offers more insight into the history of WAND:
“The WAND taxonomies have been used for the last fourteen years by organizations that want to benefit from industry and business function specific Foundation Taxonomies, to accelerate taxonomy development and management. The WAND Within™ partnership program is designed specifically for industry leading vendors in the taxonomy market, who add superior technology value to provide clients with powerful solutions to manage unstructured content.”
This sticks out as an interesting tie-up and therefore one that we will keep our eyes on since these companies are positioning themselves such a way that looks as if it could be meaningful.
Megan Feil, January 02, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Gannett Wants Better Content Management
December 31, 2012
Gannett is a media and marketing company that represents USA Today, Shop Local, and Deal Chicken. One can imagine that such a prolific company has a lot of data that needs to be organized and made workable. Marketing and media companies are on the forefront of the public eye and if they do not get their client’s name out in the open, then it means less dollars in the bank for them. One way this could happen is if they do not centralize a plan for information governance. The good news is “Gannett Chooses ITM for Centralized Management of Reference Vocabularies,”as reported via the Mondeca news Web site. Mondeca is a company that specializes in knowledge management with a variety of products that structure knowledge in many possible ways. Its ITM system was built to handle knowledge structures from conception to usage and the maintenance process afterward. ITM helps organize knowledge, accessing data across multiple platforms, improved search and navigation, and aligning/merging taxonomies and ontologies.
Gannet selected Mondeca for these very purposes:
“Gannett needed software to centrally manage, synchronize, and distribute its reference vocabularies across a variety of systems, such as text analytics, search engines, and CMS. They also wanted to create vocabularies and enrich them using external sources, with the help of MEI. Gannett selected ITM as the best match for the job. At the end of the project, Gannett intends to achieve stronger semantic integration across its content delivery workflow.”
Gannett is sure to discover that Mondeca’s ITM software will provide them with better control over its data, not to mention new insights into its knowledge base. Data organization and proper search techniques are the master key to any organization’s success.
Whitney Grace, December 31, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Mondeca Moves Into Electronic Patient Records
December 10, 2012
The healthcare world continues its creep into the twenty-first century, and now Mondeca is lending a hand with the process. The French company’s Web site announces, “Mondeca Helps to Bring Electronic Patient Record to Reality.” Tasked with implementing healthcare management systems across France, that country’s healthcare agency, ASIP Santé, has turned to Mondeca for help. The press release describes the challenge:
“The task is a daunting one since most healthcare providers use their own custom terminologies and medical codes. This is due to a number of issues with standard terminologies: 1) standard terminologies take too long to be updated with the latest terms; 2) significant internal data, systems, and expertise rely on the usage of legacy custom terminologies; and 3) a part of the business domain is not covered by a standard terminology.
“The only way forward was to align the local custom terminologies and codes with the standard ones. This way local data can be automatically converted into the standard representation, which will in turn allow to integrate it with the data coming from other healthcare providers.”
The process began by aligning the standard terminology Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) with the related terminology common in Paris hospitals. Mondeca helped the effort with their expertise in complex organizational and technical processes, like setting up collaborative spaces and aligning and exporting terminology.
Our question: Will doctors use these systems without introducing more costs and errors in the push for cost efficiency? Let us hope so.
Established in 1999, Mondeca serves clients in Europe and North America with solutions for the management of advanced knowledge structures: ontologies, thesauri, taxonomies, terminologies, metadata repositories, knowledge bases, and linked open data. The firm is based in Paris, France.
Cynthia Murrell, December 10, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Heat Now Pings from Text Radar: November 23 to November 29
December 4, 2012
This week, the Text Radar content intelligence, compliance, and big data analytics blog published some excellent articles that are pertinent to those looking to utilize big data to make their business more successful.
“Raj Sabhlok Asserts that Big Data Can Be Used to Make Any Important Business Decision” uses the example of the successful use of microtargeting by the Obama campaign in the 2012 election and then goes on to explain how big data can answer questions regarding: increasing sales, venturing into new markets, increasing profitability, etc.
The post asserts:
“Sabhlok points out that the key to Big Data is understanding existing data assets and employing specialized technology to support Big Data. The structured relational databases of the past are just not designed for today’s unstructured high-volume Web and machine data. There is also a shortage of analytics experts, which makes it more difficult for organizations to take advantage of all Big Data has to offer.”
Another article, “3 Good Reasons Why Big Data is Essential for the Banking Business” profiles an article that explains why bankers should be particularly concerned with big data.
The article states:
“Bankers around the world are in a fight for their lives — a fight to find and keep profitable banking customers. Those with big-data in their corner are on to a winning strategy. According to an Ernst & Young survey, the number of customers planning on changing banks has grown 70 percent since 2011. As banks continue to cut costs and manage risk, the need to leverage data and analytics to craft a personalized, value-oriented relationship is more important than ever. Here are three things that big-data and analytics tools can do to help bankers keep satisfied and profitable customers:”
“Specific Strategy with Big Data Analysis Reaps Rewards According to Econsultancy” argues that there is a five step process that companies must undergo in order to reap the rewards from big data for market branding.
The article concludes:
“To summarize, the five step process starts by reiterating the importance of knowing your audience and tapping into social media. Also, a clear definition and understanding of a company’s objective is important, along with having an idea of ROI versus initial investment. Lastly, long term strategizing to show proof of value with Big Data analysis taking unstructured data and turning it into insightful structured data.”
While the news is continually covering a shortage of data analytics talent, we know of a company that uses big data to uniquely captures an organization’s subjects and topics into a taxonomy or ontology. Smartlogic’s Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform enhances traditional information management systems and takes the work-load off employees.
Jasmine Ashton, December 04, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
WAND Offers Taxonomy Primer and More
November 7, 2012
It has been a while since we checked out the WAND taxonomy service Web site. Our recent revisit turned up a new look, as well as some useful features. There are hot links to Wand vocabularies for SharePoint and other high profile systems that are worth a look. Also helpful is their Business Directories page. The site even provides a link to the free, open-source taxonomy management tool Protégé.
Perhaps the most useful (free) offering, though, is the clear explanation on WAND’s Taxonomy 101 page. This is a great place to send anyone looking for the basics. It gives a good definition of the term, explains the differences between a taxonomy, a thesaurus, and an ontology, and describes what a taxonomy is good for. Here’s an example of the explanation’s coherent prose:
“You could think of it as a structured vocabulary. For example, in biology, a commonly used taxonomy is that to describe all plants and animals. Generally, the categories are arranged in parent-child structure that takes the focus from broadest to most narrow. Again, to use the example of biology, the Plant and Animal taxonomy starts out at the highest level of Kingdom, and continues down through Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus until finally reaching the lowest level of Species. Each category may have its own set of synonyms to account for different ways of expressing the same concept.”
For folks who want more information, including example business-use cases, the page offers the podcast of a ten-minute interview WAND did with the Business Intelligence Network.
Based in Denver, Colorado, WAND has been in operation since 1998. They have built structured multi-lingual vocabularies and the tools and services to go with them. These taxonomies, available in eleven languages, are used in various search environments, including many industry-specific, vertical systems.
Cynthia Murrell, November 07, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Smartlogic and Kapow Software Team for Webinar
October 17, 2012
We just learned that Smartlogic, a firm delivering content intelligence solutions, will partner with Kapow Software in a webinar. The webinar will feature professionals from both firms and noted experts in the field of big data and text analytics.
The date for the webinar is October 31, 2012. You can register for the conference at http://goo.gl/q95oW.
We learned today that organizations continue to amass hundreds of terabytes of information, they are looking for sophisticated software to mine and analyze it, to help them better understand their markets and customers, and to provide new products for revenue growth.
Smartlogic and Kapow have partnered to demonstrate how organizations collect valuable information from the web and from within organizations and to extract facts, information and topics from the content to help users pinpoint their most relevant information, gain insights from it and drive revenue growth.
The webinar will include information about the sophisticated software that is available today from Kapow Software and Smartlogic to gather, evaluate and analyze Big Data. In addition, the webinar will feature Evelyn Kent and Caston Jarvis of MCT. These experts will review MCT has successfully used Kapow Software to collect unstructured data from Web sources and Content Intelligence from Smartlogic consisting of navigational taxonomies, ontologies and automated classification to extract meaning and insights from Big Data.
Looks to me like a must-attend webinar.
Stuart Schram, October 17, 2012
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