RE: Special vs general schemes

Phil,
Thanks for taking time to clarifying some practical
issues and I fully appreciate the problem one
may have in KM, industries, business etc.
I am picking a few points that don't sound right for me...

> Although the wine-categorization example is a simple one,
> it is directly
> connected to the objectives of a business devoted to the
> consumption of
> wine. The wine categorization facets reflect the
> stakeholders' understanding
> of what's important and essential in that domain.

You are talking here about user aspect of information system.
I considered this to be sorted out at the
stage when one embarks to design vocabulary.
The place of users in the design of information system is
central and implicit. In effect it is so central that there is no need
to mention it.
My focus was on the step after and I was talking about the
suitability of facet analysis to produce a vocabulary (
facet classification) once you already have domain facts,
information, needs, and other factors in place.
At this point one may think:  I have all this bottles
of wine, producers, different profile of buyers etc., tacit and
implicit
knowledge about processes involved which mounts up to thousands of
concepts...
where do I start?
So one would like to believe that there is an advantage in having more
general framework and methodology in that initial process of
organizing
this vocabulary as you are starting bottom up and you have handful of
concepts you don't know what to do with.
Is there a reason why you can't take all the processes and then
work within those towards the specific need of your system and your
users/stakeholders?

> So, should the selection of facets and topics for a
> business devoted to wine
> be driven by general schemas? Can they be? My answer is No.

13 faceted general categories we talk about is a methodology,
or even, empty boxes you can put your schema in,
while working on your vocabulary bottom-up. You should not be driven
by it but rather supported by it. And you may need this if
your stakeholders vocabulary is so big that you
can't handle it as you can handle simple one like wine boxes.
You can think of general categories as a classificationist's tool,
mind map, but this should not affect the purpose of your vocabulary.

The real question is once you use them to build your specific
vocabulary for your stakeholders - what is the point of having them?

I think the point here is that CRG believes that everything you can
say about concept of wine (i.e. that what you stakeholders need to be
said)
can be generally classified as entities, their kinds, their parts,
properties, or processes, or agents, products, place or time.
Your question whether this should or should not be done depends
on what do you want to do with it i.e. what kind of functionality
you want to provide in indexing and retrieval: automation of indexing,
type of linear display, post-coordinated searching,
building new compound concepts etc.
This is then later on 'translated' into indexing tool and interface
language for
your stakeholders that have very specific needs, blue-eyes,
hate capital letters, like thumbnails and have only 300 words
in their professional vocabulary.

If you did your job correctly when building faceted classification
your cataloguer and indexer, not to mention your stakeholders, should
not have a clue about processes, entities, properties etc.
They should find system logical and easy to use, without being
bothered
with the intelligence behind it.

> But the underlying principles of faceted classification --
> identifying
> objects by describing orthogonal characteristics -- still
> work for practical
> implementation. In fact, as implementations have already
> shown, they often
> work superbly.

one does not need to go deep into theory of faceted classification to
produce clear class divisions of characteristics by a single principle
of
classification and make sure that there is no cross classification.
This
is the first lesson in formal logic. The fact that clear division and
'one characteristics-only-vocabulary' can produce superb compound
description
is, again, lesson 1 in building indexing vocabularies.
You can't build useful compounds if instead single characteristics you
have compound characteristics.

What do you mean when saying that orthogonal characteristics works
superbly?

a) bad classification

evening red dress
morning dress
green dress
wool green dress
silk dress

here you can't make green evening dress as evening dress appears only
as compound

b) good classification

dresses by colour
red
green
yellow
...
dresses by material
silk
wool
cotton
..
dresses by purpose
evening
bathrobe
sleeping garments
...
Here you can build any compound you want

I hope you mean more than this as this is an example from
introductory lecture to classification systems in an undergraduate
library school. This is where the story starts. One has to
make sure that everybody understands this before we really start to
talk about faceted classification on what you can do with it
in knowledge organization.

>
> Should we jam the knowledge organization developed in practical
> implementations back into a broader conceptual framework of faceted
> classification? Or should the broader framework adapt to
> and be informed by
> the real world experience of information seekers?


On this list so far everyone tried to defend their own domain needs.
Does this mean that we have to wait until a sufficient number of
implementors
moves jobs across different domains including not only business,
commerce but
education, culture, art and science  - and than wait to hear what did
he/she
found in common when building portal for art and science with portal
for
grocery shops or industry....
Or are we ready to say that there is nothing that can be shared
further than Aristotle's' formal logic and basic rules of
classification
as represented by taxonomy and facet analysis demonstrated in my
example above?


Aida



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