Re: Special vs general schemes

Sorry, I don't buy that. "Universal categories" aren't useful to 
information wranglers in the real world, nor are they useful in more 
semantic, hypothetical discussions. I think "vague categories" is a more 
accurate description of what you're talking about.

Identifying "place" as a general facet only serves to confuse -- yes, it 
could be construed for wine bottles to mean "region of origin", but it 
could instead be used to mean "present warehoused location", a facet far 
more interesting to anyone concerned with stocking shelves. "Place" by 
itself means nothing, and it prejudices the classifier towards picking one 
and only one facet that has to do with place. In the industry of 
classification, it has always paid to be specific and to consider the needs 
of the user along with the qualities of the resources you're indexing.

At the other extreme, the universal qualities espoused by Ranganathan and 
others just don't apply to many resources that deserve classification. The 
"space" facet only works in the context of resources that have physical 
incarnations in a spatial location; perhaps this is obvious, but it 
confirms that there is indeed a context -- one that many data-based 
resources don't share.

In the end, the whole idea of a set of general facets as a "framework for 
facets typical of each discipline" simply limits the number of disciplines 
that can use FC (to those that fit within the framework). Ranganathan was 
really not concerned with disciplines outside of biology. I don't think 
that kind of limitation is appropriate for faceted classification in 
general, and I hope we don't impose it.

Travis Wilson
Development
http://facetmap.com

At 06:15 PM 3/13/2003 +0100, Claudio Gnoli wrote:
>""" [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").


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