"To enhance mankind's
cataloging, measurement, and sharing of ethos,
toward the end that humans will
know each other better,
and live and prosper in harmony."
To create an interoperable cataloging system for collections of data and content, so that those collections can be more easily accessed by internet users. Our focus is primarily on the human services sector.
Ethos is the spirit or core beliefs of a group of people.
Ethos is measured and cataloged by many organizations around the world.
Taxonomies are often used in such cataloging efforts.
Taxonomies are structure groups of categories.
For example, an organization may catalog the core beliefs about education for various villages.
There are many different aspects that can be cataloged about the ethos of education. Examples include
cataloging important content published by residents of the villages, and
surveying the level of education that residents may have achieved.
One taxonomy that an organization might use to catalog educational ethos would be about "grade levels".
The taxonomy might have first-level categories of "elementary, middle school, high school, college, and graduate school".
Then those categories might have sub-categories.
For example the "college" category might have sub-categories of "private, public, technical, liberal arts, etc".
A problem arises when multiple organizations catalog ethos using taxonomies that have different category names.
For example other taxonomies may name their "college" category as "undergraduate" or "bachelors degree".
Also, many taxonomies use foreign language names for their categories.
The Swahili for "college" is "chuo".
How can all of the content and data in those separate catalogs be brought together, and made more "interoperable"?
InterEthos offers interoperability services for taxonomies.
The three main services are:
SHARING, where one taxonomy can be shared out to mulitple servers or applications on the Internet,
CORRELATION, where the categories of different taxonomies can be classified as synonyms for each other, and
INTERNATIONALIZATION, where taxonomies can be translated into foreign languages.
The goal of InterEthos is to enhance the way ethos is measured, cataloged and shared across the internet, by creating interoperability between taxonomies.
Users can share their Collections, or keep them private.
Users can cross-reference and internationalize the Taxonomies used to index those Collections.
"Master Taxonomy" categories allow users to classify their Collections with common category terms, so as to enhance the accessibility of those Collections via third-party applications.
Meta data can be assigned to each "leaf" of Taxonomies enabling users to more easily search.
Users can internationalize (ie. language translation) their Taxonomy categories and meta data into an unlimited number of languages, so that content on a single-language site (ex. English) can be found with search terms from other languages (ex. Spanish, Swahili, etc).
Sophistacated XML outputs (if you don't find what you need, then please ask).
System logins for "guests" (default / no login required), "owners", and "administrators" of provide a "trail" of who created and who can modify what Collections and Taxonomies.
Privacy settings to define who can access different Collections and Taxonomies, and for what purposes.
Users register their use of a particular Taxonomy, so that people interested in mining content indexed under the leaves of that Taxonomy will have a ready-made list of sites where they will find the Taxonomy used.
Versioning of shared Taxonomies allow them to be modified over time, while allowing users of older versions to know how their versions differ.
System customizations enable different kinds of Taxonomies to be handled in different ways
maintaining Taxonomies used to classify census data requires different handling than maintaining Taxonomies about non-profit business services, and
Collections originating in European countries largely use metric measurements, whereas US ones do not, and both can be made interchangable
The availability of InterEthos is monitored by monitis.
Contact Us:
Josh Shortlidge | on LinkedIn | 781-462-1113
132 Bay State Road, Melrose, MA 02176
