Sunday, July 31, 2005
Hierarchy vs. Facets vs Tags
A paper with that title is found here.
I am not yet sure I know what to make of it; there is a lot of material there, and links to related resources. The issues raised are real and important.
A truly first-rate hierarchy would not only have all of the characteristics of FN's hierarchy, but it would also manage to encode the hierarchy in such a way as to eliminate all ambiguity as to where an item might be found. FN comes pretty close. But you can always imagine that it might be hard to decide where that sock garter really goes? Bottoms? Legs? Ankles? Feet? It's also easy to imagine how that favorite pair of stretchy pants might do equally well @Home or @Gym.
[As a result, Hierarchies are horrible at #3: Targeted search and retrieval of individual items. In a hierarchy where items can only live in 1 place, the messier the hierarchy is, the harder it is to figure out where to put an item and the harder it is to figure out where you put it, when it's time to find it.]
But as you'll, see this is a problem even in faceted classification systems.
It turns out that the author of that paper has her papers indexed here, with plenty to read.
3 Comments:
I have only skimmed the paper quickly, but from a librarian's perspective, the most obvious question to ask is why the author appears to take for granted that a classification alone should be sufficient for retrieval purposes. Librarians gave up on that idea more than a century ago, when Dewey published his classification complete with a Relative Index.
The purpose of the RI was to guide both classifiers and users to topics which were hard to find using the systematic listings. Individual libraries also compiled and maintained indexes (often chain indexes) to the classification as applied locally.
BOB (back-of-book) indexes perform a similar function on a smaller scale. A book's table of contents can be viewed as analogous to a classification scheme, showing the order in which topics are discussed. Like its library equivalent, the BOB index can provide a different approach to the organisation, cutting across the grain, as it were.
Does electronic retrieval really have no equivalent to this two-pronged approach? Or have I read too quickly, and missed something?
Does electronic retrieval really have no equivalent to this two-pronged approach?
I'm inclined to expect that Murray and others will jump in here and talk to that question; my first response is to say that a good topic map in a library would provide for all possible approaches. You can have hierarchy, facets, and tags coming from every direction, and still find the subjects you want. It strikes me that, once we have most all literature available such that it can be scanned for indexical purposes (maybe just all the BOB indexes and tables of contents online), we can craft a topic map that, through community process such as those found at tagging sites like delicious, such a resource can come into existence.
I don't think the paper, to which I linked, heads for any such conclusion.
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