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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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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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…
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1. Theory In the land of information science (related to but distinct from generalized information theory, which is much more mathematical and concerned with, for example, signals), taxonomy theory is more or less dictated…
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I wrote, not quite a year ago, a short post about some new words, phrases, and idioms emerging from the then-new pandemic in the context of controlled vocabularies. The point of…
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Consider the small hierarchical structure shown at right; you might find something like it in any number of product, e-commerce, or indexing taxonomies:Although this structure seems reasonable at first glance,…
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This fall was supposed to be my 25th class reunion at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, but since traveling to gather in large groups is obviously inadvisable the event was made virtual.…
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Bob Kasenchak and Ahren Lehnert, Synaptica The theme of the final class in the ongoing free-to-attend Stanford Knowledge Graph course was What are some open research questions on knowledge graphs?…
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Bob Kasenchak and Ahren Lehnert, Synatpica The theme of last week’s class in the ongoing free-to-attend Stanford Knowledge Graph course was “What is the role of knowledge graphs in machine…
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