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
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
WAND Releases New Taxonomy Word List
September 8, 2012
The Wand Inc blog recently reported on the newest addition to the WAND Taxonomy Library in the post “WAND Sales and Marketing Taxonomy Now Available.”
According to the article, the new taxonomy expands the foundation of sales and marketing terminology for WAND. It has 443 categories and 167 synonyms covering all important sales and marketing concepts including promotion, advertising, market research, pricing, product, market segmentation and sales channels.
The post recommends this taxonomy foundation as the most efficient way to tag your documents and expand upon it:
“If you are trying to tag and organize documents for a sales and marketing group, this taxonomy is ideal as a foundation to get you started. It can be easily customized for your organization with things like specific customer lists, specific sales channels and regions, and more.”
In addition to this it is ready for use right out of the box for SharePoint, Oracle Webcenter, Documentum, and more. WAND specializes in developing pre-built taxonomies that cover a wide variety of domains and fields. This is an excellent solution to try out if you are looking to expand your sales and marketing taxonomy.
Jasmine Ashton, September 08, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
WAND Inc Makes Integration Plans with Nintex Workflow Official
August 30, 2012
Last week WAND, Inc announced its plans to integrate with Nintex Workflow. Wand, Inc is attributed to making search work better by the use of its various taxonomies and Nintex is the world’s leader in SharePoint Workflow. Separately they are powerhouses in their specific field and combined they seem to have a lot to offer each other. The article, WAND adds automatic tagging to Nintex Workflow sheds some more light on what this match up could mean:
“The DataFacet Automatic Annotation custom action for Nintex Workflow allows a user to automatically tag documents with taxonomy metadata as part of a workflow process. Users who have DataFacet and Nintex Workflow …will be able take advantage of this custom action to control when a document is automatically tagged and base conditional actions on those tags. Workflows can be configured to tag documents with any terminology that is stored in the SharePoint Term Store, including terms from any of WAND’s Foundation Taxonomies.”
If everything runs smoothly for these two, this seems like a decent match up that has some great potential. I think it is safe to say that we can be expecting some great things from these guys in the coming years.
Edie Marie, August 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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