Special vs general schemes

""" [Travis Wilson]  
Can there even be such a thing as a general faceted schema? 
Facets only seem to make sense within a context. """

In a sense that's true; however, general faceted schemes
do exist, such as Colon Classification and Bliss Bibliographic 
Classification 2nd edition. This is possibile because what they 
use as general facets are just "universal" categories, such 
as part, property, process, agent, space, time, which serve 
as a framework to arrange facets typical of each discipline 
in a useful and consistent order: e.g., for wines _property_
can be alcoholic rate, _place_ can be country of origin, etc. 
(Aida too pointed out this distinction between "conceptual 
facets" and "wine bottle facets").


""" [Phil Murray]  
given a context (for example, a product catalog or the 
knowledge of an organization), it's much, much easier 
to develop and maintain a faceted classification for that 
context than it is to develop and maintain a "traditional" 
polyhierarchical schema. (But the two approaches can be 
complementary.) """

It is. A similar situation occur in special libraries, where 
users are accustomed to a specialized context of research, 
a jargon, etc., so they feel better with a special classification 
(e.g. Mathematics Subject Classification), while they find 
general ones (e.g. Dewey), to be awkward and inappropriate 
for their field.

However, general systems offer the advantage of being
universal languages, which could be used at any moment
to expand the scope of the document collection or to relate 
it to other collections. And this could reveal very useful 
in networked digital environments, hence the popularity 
of questions about interoperability.


""" The answer lies somewhere in between [...] and *mapping* 
of such "special" schemas into broader, top-down schemas 
can be an alternative to constant revision of schemas for 
general collections under which specific implementations 
may be subsumed. """

Yes, indeed: ideally we would need a meta-language which 
preserve the specialization of local systems but connect (_map_) 
them in a general frame. However, as "there is no free lunch",
any meta-language unfortunately implies some loss in precision 
of the languages it connect, while a general system at least 
can warrant internal coherence in its structure, vocabulary, etc.

So the matter is: how much to _invest_ in a system more 
general but more complicate to use?... How broad is 
the task we are undertaking: is it just local and for 
short-range use, or could it develop connections in future 
which we should provide for?

From this perspective, I don't see much difference
between business and library tasks. After all, even libraries
have to manage available funds and time, and selection of
priorities is a relevant part of their work, both in buying 
documents and in indexing them at a given degree of detail.
Neither librarians use international classifications when
they have to manage 200 kid books in a village library :-)
Neither for libraries the goal is categorization itself, but 
efficiency in helping users to find what they need.


Thank you for this stimulating discussion!



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