David John
Minneapolis, MN (USA)
Role(s):
Founder/Owner/Principal
Nodonomy
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Startup
Location:
Minneapolis
Industry:
Technology/Web
Year Founded:
1992
Number Employees:
1-10 people
Description:
Nodonomy is a toolset designed to organize, display and search huge amounts of data. Its sole data structure is the taxonomy. A patented, hierarchical database stores the taxonomies (which are also persisted in the file system), and patent pending algorithms facilitate its unique abilities with respect to organization, display and search.
Nodonomy is additionally a tree database and management system. So, Nodonomy can store and work with hundreds and thousands of trees, including dynamic trees: query a relational database like Oracle using SQL and build a Nodonomy compatible tree.
Nodonomy is all about taxonomies. Taxonomy and tree are synonyms in Nodonomy's lexicon. All information is organized in trees in one way or another, even if it is organized in two dimensional tables in a relational database (how this is the case takes some discussion). Another words for "organize" are "classify" and "categorize". Human beings seem to be hardwired to "classify" information. We naturally categorize where things are in relation to others. You see this everywhere: the classification of books, the classification of the stars, the categorization of the plant and animal kingdoms. One can safely bet data in any organization is also classified in some way, meaning that Nodonomy can show users that classification.
Why would it be useful to show users how data is classified? In most cases this is simple to see, as in the case of books in the library, or movies at Netflix. Medical records, on the other hand, are much more complex of course, and Nodonomy handles complexity very, very well: the key is that people really don't want to see all the data or how all the data is classified. Instead they want to see only that data of interest to them, either generally (a pharmacist probably wants to see different information than a doctor or the bookkeeping department). So Nodonomy allows for "custom" taxonomies that portray these subsets. Additionally, when you do a search in Nodonomy, your search results are also placed in their respective categories (i.e., not in the usual "Top 10" search results). This is real power.
Nodonomy currently operates on three different kinds of taxonomies: "reference" taxonomies (3M products fit into this category), "custom" taxonomies (an example of this would be a subset of 3M products of interest to an airline manufacturing industry), and "independent" taxonomies (these would be standalone taxonomies that are made for a single purpose, independent of other taxonomies; an example I like is the use of a web crawler that extracts a site map, which is of course a taxonomy). One additional kind of taxonomy is a "process" taxonomy, since it is recognized at Nodonomy that a business process can be also manifested as a taxonomy (this is an area of research here, one where significant success has be achieved).
Nodonomy uses its Builder technology to create custom taxonomies from reference taxonomies. Its Server is a web service application running under Apache Tomcat, and its Explorer is browser based.