Taxonomies times four

Applied Semantics announces four new taxonomies as extensions to its Auto-Categorizer product, which it describes as content categorization software that maps documents into one or multiple predefined or customer-specified hierarchies of categories without the need for time-consuming user training.

The company says the four industry-standard taxonomies supplementing the existing Open Directory Project (ODP) and International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) taxonomy portfolio, include:

• Medical Subject Headings (MeSH): the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) controlled vocabulary thesaurus consists of more than 20,000 headings used by NLM for indexing articles from more than 4,000 biomedical journals for the MedLine database and for other NLM-produced databases.

• Standard Industrial Classification System (SIC): the U.S. Department of Labor's system of 1,000-plus, four-level codes that is used to classify business establishments by the types of products or services they offer;

• Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC): a 13,000-plus category taxonomy that is an open, global standard for providing a logical framework for classifying products and services, for buy- and sell-side catalogs or as a standardized account code in analyzing expenditures; and

• Geography Codes: an 800-category taxonomy consisting of country codes standardized around the International Organization of Standardization's (ISO) 3,166 alpha-2 code schema, enhanced with a list of U.S. states and major U.S. and international cities.

The company adds that those taxonomies are plug-and-play modules that can be individually licensed to enhance Applied Semantics’ Auto-Categorizer.