RE: Special vs general schemes

Travis,

General facets or 'vague facets' are by no means meant to
be used in organizing a pantry or warehouse. If that would
have been Ranaganathan's task he would not be concerned
about general facets - in the same way you aren't.

General facet categories are necessary to communicate
knowledge (not wine bottles) and this is where they
are an intelligent way of establishing a general/specific order
of concepts.

These are two entirely different fields of application of
classification. And in the same way as you have to solve your
own warehouse problem, others have to solve the problem of
portal to collection of thesis in the field of biology.

I don't know why you think that knowledge or information
is not equally worth classifying as bottles or colours
or houses, or shoes. But you did not mean this and it is
not intellectually honest to twist your statement in this way.

> 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.

exactly.... and if your users are researchers looking for
influence of string theory on the reconcilliation between
quantum mechanics and relative theory in French? Or researcher looking
for corn growing methods in mediaeval France or educators looking
for learning materials for tutorial in irregular latin verbs for
high schools, for visually challenged students?

> 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 knowledge organization - alphabetical indexing languages like
thesauri have to be specific in their goal.
Classification serves an entirely different purpose.
When applied for knowledge organization, classification's function
is to put together things that belong together - in classes of
things. The fact that classes are not specific could be considered
an advantage of classification as it can serve different
levels of granularity. So 'France' for instance would have enough
context to be understood in the expression "economy of France in
19th century".

> 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.

I don't know about Ranaganathan's concern about biology only.
He was a mathematician and his colon classifiction is general
and universal. But when talking about general categories we
don't talk about PMEST (5 facets) any more, we rather accept
CRG suggestion of 13.

General facet categories will not be imposed, they will be
sought by the virtue of the task one has to perform in relation
to the material one has to classify. You certainly won't, because
you have a task simple enough it can be solved by a simple facet
technique. What the rest of us are looking for is how to
use what you have achieved on this level to solve problems on
the level above.


aida




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