Introduction

Multiple millennia ago, mankind set out to create wealth by turning everyday substances into gold. This was early alchemy, and ultimately it did not work. Despite the best minds and the best efforts, no one succeeded to transform other substances into gold because gold is an element. You can discover gold, you can dig for gold, and you can pan for gold, but you cannot create gold.

But the world has changed. Today we have a type of “modern alchemy” that really can create gold.

Text is the common fabric of society. Business is transacted in text, arguments are made in text, court cases are conducted in text, conversations between best friends transpire through text. In short, text is the medium of exchange between people living on earth.

Since the beginning of computing, text has defied the computer. Text is simply the original square peg in the round hole. Computer processes focus on structured transactions (not text).

For most of its early history, the computer was not much help in dealing with text. That was a shame, as some of the most important information was in the form of text.

But today, there exist advancements in technology that allow the computer to read, store and analyze text. And in doing so, a whole world of informed decision-making is possible. Unlike the alchemists of yore, if you know what you are doing, you really can turn text into gold.

As more and more applications were built, computer scientists realized that in order to manage those applications, an abstraction was needed. Enter the data model: an abstraction of computer applications. Furthermore, someone eventually observed that there was a lot of valuable data found in the text. In order to capture and use that text, the technology known as textual disambiguation was developed. Finally, at the intersection of data models and textual disambiguation, it dawned on computer scientists that an abstraction of text was needed.

Enter taxonomies.

Taxonomies have been around for a long time – long before the first computer was built or even conceived. But it is in the world of computation, where users must come to grips with text, that taxonomies have found a truly novel and important use.

Speech is complex. We are taught speech by our parents at a young age, and mimic it even before then. Adult brains process speech in a largely automated manner. But the automatic processing that occurs in our brain masks the complexity of speech.

Taxonomies (classifications) are critical to the processing of text. If we wish to get computers to process data like the brain does, then we need taxonomies. Sure, there is more to processing text than resolving text using taxonomies. But for most text, taxonomical resolution is the first step to making text useful.

This book will introduce you to the concept of taxonomies and how they are used to simplify and understand text.

This book is a practical book. Very little theory is discussed. Instead, the emphasis is on the practical aspects and usages of taxonomies, and the subsequent usage of taxonomies as a basis for textual analytics.

This book is for students of computer science, managers who have to deal with text, programmers who need to understand taxonomies, systems analysts who need to understand how to get business value out of a body of text, and especially those who are struggling to decode data lakes. Hopefully for those individuals (and many more), this book will serve as both an introduction to taxonomies and a guide to how taxonomies can be used to bring text into the realm of corporate decision-making.

WHI, Castle Rock, Co 1/1/2017