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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Not just NPTs: Thinking in Labels 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...
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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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On Polyhierarchy 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.) ...
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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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In taxonomy, granularity refers to the number of terms describing a concept and its sub-concepts. This rubric can apply to an entire vocabulary or some subset. In short, the question...
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I am not a fan. A taxonomist working on any taxonomy of sufficient size and scope will encounter disambiguation issues. This occurs when the label for a term isn’t clear…
