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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Ask Who? Taxonomies do not build themselves. Constructing any controlled vocabulary requires, at minimum, input from end users, subject matter experts, and a taxonomist. End users and subject matter experts can provide concepts and their attributes for inclusion…
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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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Knowledge Graphs We have talked about knowledge graphs before in blogs, webinars, and conference workshops and presentations. Our partners at Ontotext also do a good job of describing knowledge graphs in their blog. So, I’m not going…
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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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Metadata At this point, we all live in the digital universe. We order our goods online, we conduct most of our business digitally, and we socialize and interact virtually. The internet of…
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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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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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