My Knowledge Organization aka Classification professor often discusses how we are all essentially classifying beings, but how each person brings chaos into order in slightly different ways.
For instance, my partner, she insists on placing the travel mugs in the same drawer with the tupperware containers. Classes, in classification theory, are grouped based on similar properties and distinguished from co-ordinate classes based on an unlike property. Her idea, as far as I can tell every morning, is that travel mugs have lids, are used outside the house, and are not made of glass.
I, on the other hand, continue to move them to the cupboard with the glasses and china mugs, on the basis that they are also made to hold coffee and tea, and they are not made to hold solids.
Think there is a solution to these different paradigms of hot beverage container storage? Nope.
Dal Porto, Susanna and Marchitelli, Andrea (2006) Functionality and flexibility of traditional classification schemes applied to a Content Management System (CMS): facets, DDC, JITA. Knowledge organization 33 (2006)(1):pp. 35-44.
I just picked up the latest issue of KO here, and there is a really good article for people interested in the internal classification of websites.
One point which seems so obvious to me now is the idea of faceted categorizations of blog posts, or faceted folksonomies. Looking at the Italian cite Biblioatipici they use a set of seven fundamental categories, in between the number set out by Ranganathan and the Classification Research Group (CRG): Entities, Products, Instruments, Agents, Space and Time. Subclasses are entered freely under these.
So, here I am overjoyed, a way to cut a balance between pre- and post-cordinated order, right. Seems I am not the first one to make that connection.
I guess del.icio.us has that ability, but I never really made the connection between theory and practice, or the slightly different jargons on the web and in the literature.
A good article, discusses DCC and JITA as well.
