At PI, we specialize in team projects. Whether it’s collaboration among the partners on business matters or a larger project involving associates, like our embedded indexing work for O’Reilly Media, collaboration comes up in some form in everything we do. Benefits of collaboration Working together has obvious benefits, like sharing the workload to meet tight […]
Building an Online Library
Here at PI, we are finding more small-scale consulting and special interest businesses looking to build virtual libraries of information for their users. And they are often coming from a place where they don’t quite know what “pieces” they need to get this done in a way that’s useful. Their project is too big for […]
Still Smarter than Bots
It’s been very enlightening finding out that we’re still smarter than those little programs that go around and index websites. I realize that computers like IBM’s Watson are making waves on Jeopardy and elsewhere, but semantic understanding seems to still be primarily the domain of humans. Bots come up with the darndest things! The Downside […]
Tackling Oral Histories at the ASI Conference
Last month, Richard Shrout and I attended the ASI Annual Conference in Chicago, presented in conjunction with the Indexing Society of Canada (ISC/SCI). The conference had much to offer, from networking to catching up with friends to exploring new indexing skills. There were many excellent sessions, and lots to learn, on specialties from textbook indexing […]
Yellow Page Listings: Enhancing an Ontology
In a previous post, I related our experience with a large-scale taxonomy project for a huge jobs database. In that project, I worked with a complex hierarchy of job categories and sub-categories. It was mind-boggling, but I learned a tremendous amount about how the human mind still trumps the computer when it comes to discerning […]
Matching Job Titles Across Cultures
Here at PI, we like to humanize the search process for lots of different categories of knowledge. Two projects we worked on last year epitomized the need that many information providers have to make sure that their search keywords and taxonomic structures are complete in the sense that they have enough of the right sorts […]
