The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
Issue No. 58 - 17 October 2011
In This Issue
ACM Book List
Taxonomy Management Software
Door64 Tech Fair Highlights
Seen Recently
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Most Popular ACM Online Books
The latest list of most popular ACM titles, published by Safari Books Online, includes:

These books are free to members of ACM and to subscribers of Books24/7.

Key Criteria for Taxonomy Management Software
Taxonomy is an area of growing importance as companies realize how many "controlled vocabularies" they are separately developing and managing -- sometimes dozens of them. Initial work is often done with Excel or a mindmapping tool, but one realizes soon that a specialized product is needed. Just looking at detailed thesaurus management functionality and cost is not enough. In recent work, we found the need to pay attention to the following:
  • Support for polyhierarchy and an extensible set of associative relationship types
  • Unlimited read-only access to the taxonomy via a Web client 
  • Integration with Content Management Systems, such as Sharepoint (whose quirks can make this integration tricky)
  • Availability of a companion document indexing product -- and a manageable process to train the indexer to recognize the concepts in the documents.  
Door64 Tech Fair Highlights

Door64, a community of 18,000 technology professionals in Central Texas, held a "tech fair" in Austin on September 26. Among the exhibitors, mostly startups, were:

  • Legiant: devices and software for time capture (badging in and out, recording of billable time spent on specific tasks...) 
  • Journyx: online time sheets
  • iCommNet: an advanced search engine based on natural language processing (NLP)
  • Google Places: local advertising through Google Maps "pins"
  • LifeSize, by Logitech: high-definition videoconferencing over the Internet (really good quality, even at just 384 kb/s)
  • Drilling Info: a small competitor to IHS, the marketplace for energy-related information. They gather Oil & Gas permit and contract data, mostly from public sources or small operators. Data entry is performed in Mexico.
  • CopperEgg: a hosted service that collects performance data from agents installed on a company's server, and provides reports. Costs $5 per server per month, less in volume.
  • Cinetics: they make Cineskates, cute modular rolling tripods for controlled motion of cameras.
  • atrack: a cloud-based inventory/schedule/client management system for small businesses (auto repair shops, hair salons...)
  • Affinegy: a system to manage a home network of computers and entertainment devices (they're not yet focused on smart homed devices such as thermostats and alarms)
  • The Experience Lab: usability testing of Web applications.
Seen Recently...

"The management, such as the transfer and sharing, of tacit knowledge is, by definition, something that must involve some level of engagement between a person who has such knowledge and a person who desires it. The engagement, in my experience, works best when there is less of a teacher/student approach and more of a collaborative approach."

-- Fred McClimans, Business Analyst, in a Quora discussion 

on "What is the best way to manage tacit knowledge?"