About Us
We are experts in the design and delivery of semantic solutions
Access Innovations, Inc. was found in Albuquerque, NM in 1978. We are a pioneer and the industry leader in making information assets easily and automatically discoverable. Our major advantage is our patented, award-winning Data Harmony software. Data Harmony, combined with our technical expertise, work together to for your semantic solutions. We work with you to create information discovery systems that will meet your unique needs. Access Innovations has built thousands of controlled vocabularies through more than 2,000 client engagements.
We deliver clean, well-formed, metadata-enriched content so our clients can reuse, repurpose, store, and find their knowledge assets. We go beyond the standards to build a solid foundation for your information for taxonomies and other data control structures. Our services and software allow organizations to use and present their information to both internal and external constituents by leveraging search, presentation, and e-commerce.
In our own way, the small but mighty team at Access Innovations is a pioneer in artificial intelligence. We launched Data Harmony, our semantic metadata software suite, in 1997. It has been benefitting publishers and corporations and their users for 27 years. Choose the system that’s field tested and proven, rather than one that is still imaginary and in development. We change search to found!
Leadership
Heather Kotula
President and CEO
Heather Kotula is the President and CEO of Access Innovations, Inc. Her role encompasses the company’s strategy as well as overseeing operations management. This includes marketing, communications, and sales, corporate finance, infrastructure and administration, and work for clients. She has been active in the company, full time, since 1996.
Keenly interested in artificial intelligence and its inner workings, she has been involved in numerous taxonomy works. Overseeing the launch of the original AOL taxonomy search, Heather set up and ran the Missoula, Montana office for Access Innovations. This taxonomy supported AOL’s search for many years.
In addition to her duties at Access Innovations, Heather is active in several professional societies in the industry. She is a member of the SLA Board of Directors and active in the Society for Scholarly Publishing, serving on various committees. Heather is known for her creative presentations and publications at conferences and meeting such as SLA, Taxonomy Boot Camp, NISOPlus, and SSP.
Marjorie Hlava
Founder, Chairman, Chief Science Officer
Margie Hlava is Chief Scientist, Chairman, and founder of Access Innovations, Inc. If you are curious about taxonomies and their implementation Margie is the one to talk with. She is currently convener of the ISO 25964 Information and documentation — Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies — Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval, management, and use. She contributed to the Z39.19 2005 Controlled Vocabulary and the Z39.85 Dublin Core standard development teams. She also created the taxonomy for the CrEdit standard, worked on the Z39.104 Standards Specific Ontology for Standards (SSOS), the DOI Syntax and DOI Contributed Metadata set, Open URL Standard Advisor, NISO Z39.88, and others. She served on the NISO board for five years and the NISO Content Board. She is past president several organizations, including NFAIS (2002-2003), American Society for Information Science and Technology – 1993 (ASIST), Documentation Abstracts 1990-1991, Hubbell Society Museum and Library (1994-1998). She has received many awards including the ASIST Award of Merit and Watson Davis Award, the NFAIS Miles Conrad and Ann Marie Cunningham Awards, the John Cotton Dana Award, Fellow in 2006, and Presidents Award in 1999 from the Special Libraries Association, where she also founded Taxonomy Division in 2009, and served on the Board of Directors of SLA (Twice), Hubbell Hall of Fame Award 2021, Woman of Influence in Technology, and has held numerous other positions in these and other organizations. She has given countless presentations domestically and internationally, including several keynote addresses. She has published more than two hundred articles and five books on information science topics and is a member of NKOS. Her research areas include furthering the productivity of content creation and the governance layer for metadata and information access through automated indexing, thesaurus development, taxonomy creation, natural language processing, machine translations, and machine aided indexing, and other knowledge organization systems (KOS) topics – all the building blocks that now go into the hot AI topics. She holds two patents with 21 claims addressing automation of information processing and tagging.
Dr. Jay Ven Eman
Chief Administration Officer
As the Chief Administration Officer of our company, Dr. Jay Ven Eman brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. With a focus on AI and knowledge organization systems, Jay is a popular speaker and has given many presentations, workshops, and seminars on a wide range of topics related to database development, file conversions, and markup languages such as HTML, XML, and SGML. Jay earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in organizational behavior from the University of Colorado, a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of New Mexico, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in business from the University of Washington. With his expertise and passion for innovation, you can trust that you’re in good hands when you work with Jay.
