Legacy in Language There are potential or new clients who come to us with a definitive version of their taxonomy, typically in a spreadsheet format like CSV or Excel. The…
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Semantic Relationships I wrote a blog, “Building Healthy Relationships (in Ontologies)” last year, and I’m returning to this content to explore the development of semantic relationships in more detail. Specifically,…
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Hierarchy Depth “Taxonomy” has become the de facto term for most types of controlled vocabularies, including flat lists, authority files, simple hierarchies, or thesauri. Whether we choose to be pedantic…
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For our Insights series we talked with Helen Lippell and Bob Kasenchak about Taxonomies: Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information. This curated anthology by Helen Lippell…
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Concept Names Language is inherently ambiguous. The dream to create universally agreed-upon, standardized conceptual language will be extremely difficult. We can achieve widely-accepted consensus, but that’s the silent agreement we…
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Looking Forward I have blogged before about trends in taxonomies and ontologies, particularly based on observations from KMWorld and Taxonomy Boot Camp (in 2017, 2019, and 2020), Taxonomy Boot Camp…
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The taxonomy standards (ANSI/NISO z39.19, ISO 25964-1, et al.) were written using the standard thesaural relationships and their abbreviations: BT, NT, RT, NPT (or “Use For”). Accordingly, the first generation…
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Graphite KOS 5.0 Another year added to Synaptica’s 25 (+1) tenure and already we have our second major release of our knowledge organization system (KOS), Graphite, in 2021. We are continuing to update and evolve Graphite’s functionality to meet our…
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Definition In taxonomy, a polyhierarchy refers to any hierarchical structure that allows a term to have multiple parents. (The opposite concept, monohierarchy, is used to describe taxonomies that do not allow polyhierarchy.) Polyhierarchy does not apply…
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Comparing A to B While recently discussing taxonomy versioning with a few of our clients, they cited A/B testing as one of their use cases for creating taxonomy versions. In addition to creating point-in-time versions of…
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