RE: Special vs general schemes

Travis

> The BC isn't universal, because a store selling chairs
> can't use it. (I
> haven't perused the BC to see if it does, in fact, have a
> subclass of
> categories specifically for chairs, but if it did, I'd just
> have to find an
> example for which the BC has no subclass. Can it organize my home
> finances?) Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't
> even include
> categories for physical characteristics of information --
> like the height
> of a book, which is a key facet for bookstores and some libraries.

When librarians speak about general or universal classification
scheme they mean the classification scheme build to cover the
whole of knowledge. These are rough maps of knowledge that help to
organize collections of documents spanning a huge knowledge
area. 'General' means for general collections / general
area of knowledge - in which contents are not described in
any considerable depth.

When one speaks of Ranganathan CC or BC2 on this
list this is not because these are ready made
schemes for you to use but rather because these schemes have been
built on a certain methodology  - and this methodology is what we
are all concerned about. The methodology consists of a number of
conceptual/general facets (attribute types?).

Also something that causes confusion: library classification schemes
are built to be a part of information system that already has rather
rich surrogate/metadata and maybe other more specific alphabetical
indexing languages to be used in combination with it. This redundancy
is well known and heavily built on in bibliographic IR systems. This
is why
this system can afford to use 'rough' classifications like BC2 or CC
and
can make rather good use of it.

Some KM application may use similar methodology (cum
grano salis, of course). In doing so one has to keep in mind
that the whole chunk of metadata for resource discovery in
bibliographic systems comes from elsewhere and not from
classification. Classification is concerned with subject only,
and forms of knowledge presentation within subjects.
When building surrogates there is a good reason to split
the level of physical carrier (e.g. text), format (e.g. e-mail),
form of presentation (e.g. report) and content of information
(e.g. international KM conference). Classification does not
have to take care about anything else but about these last
two.
> Since we had to revise PMEST when it became unsuitable,
> don't you suppose
> we'll have to revise the new set of 13 whenever it's
> unsuitable? CRG does

By all means! I actually thought that this list may be
interested in the problem.

I think if things can be generalized one way or the other it would
be helpful. Unlike you I believe that there are many similarities
between indexing languages. In terms of knowledge organization there
may be some
general common models. And I think we would all like to see how this
could be put together into one neat 'machine understandable' and
shareable
ontological framework that would be a basis in building
different knowledge organization tools for special purposes.
In this ideal situation we would have agreement on data naming,
formatting language, list of useful inference rules, registry of
relationships
between concepts ... and we would be able to produce as many specific
vocabularies as we want.

What, I don't think is useful, is to jump back into what could be
called a 'semantic soup' of descriptive metadata and go back to
the square one by ignoring useful and tested principles in
building surrogates. We should be focusing on the level
of knowledge classification and information content and not blur
the picture by already solved problems of surrogate production or
information management.
(i.e. how to describe e-mail, as opposed to memos, as opposed to
books, as
opposed to web pages. And how to build a system to suit the audience,
if it is busy and demanding, children or senior citizens etc.)
In my understandings these are not the real problems of knowledge
organization
tools such as classification. This belongs to the wider area of
information organization and management.

>
> I don't believe in a Grand Unified Theory of physics either :)
>

Do you want to say that the article about Strings theory in the last
Scientific American wasn't convincing enough?  :-)

Aida



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