March 11, 2019
By Heather Kotula President & CEO, Access Innovations, Inc.
View from the Top

Access Innovations, Heather Kotula, VP Marketing and Communications discusses the challenges of knowledge organization

The challenges of knowledge organization aren’t new—theories of knowledge management have existed since Greek and Babylonian times, with notables like Aristotle and Plato dedicating considerable thought to the notion. Great thinkers throughout history joined them in creating various models and constructs.

While we have wonderful new tools to dedicate to managing knowledge, it is imperative that we also dedicate thought and consideration at the beginning. Starting with a focus on search, discovery and retrieval in mind, preparing information for later retrieval is a task that we too often side-step. Adding metadata and even a modicum of semantic enrichment to pieces of information—or knowledge—vastly improves search results later.

We talk about the planet in terms of what we are leaving for our children, but no less consideration should be given to the vast collection of knowledge that we pass down to them. Data lakes are just as polluted as our oceans, and search still does not meet user needs. There are hundreds of articles dedicated to tips on improving full text search, yet fielded search—perhaps a holdover from the Internet’s early days when bibliographic databases online were a novelty—still yields measurably better search results.

Do you remember the debates around precision and recall? We’re battling the same issues today, throwing money and computing power at the problem, but without the benefit of deep thought. At Access Innovations, we think through innovative solutions based on clever insights. Every collection is unique and requires careful thought combined with the best available technology to serve user needs.