Contact:cdent@burningchrome.com
Bowker, G.C. & Star, L.S. (1999). Chapter 3: The ICD as information
infrastructure. In _Sorting things out: Classification and its
consequences_ (p. 107-133). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
-=-=-
A whole slew of information on how systems of classification help to
create infrastructure in systems. In there, two items stood out for
me:
Quoting the League of Nations:
Rather than omit from the beginning all which are not yet
satisfactory, the authors have hoped, by including them and utilizing
them for what they are worth, to create a demand for their
improvement...
This models a solution to a frequent stumbling block for "Information
Architects" in this day and age. So often people want to come up with
a structure before they really know what the resource will be used
for. The search for structure becomes so intense that using the
resource is delayed and delayed until its eventual value is lost.
I advocate, instead, for situations where the structure is not
apparent, the following process:
- get the data
- if it is already chunked in some fashion, give those chunks unique
identifiers
- build an information retrieval system that does free text indexing
to allow string matching
At this stage we now have a semi-useful resource where there was
nothing before. Next:
- as searches reveal user needs:
- begin tagging resource with metadata
- and/or reevaluate the chunking of the documents
- use the metadata to create faceted retrieval systems
As Wheatley suggested: information is a process that causes
organization. The organizational structures we impose upon in
information can be reveal in how we use the information. They are
structures of convenience and as such we must be prepared to undertake
inconvenient work to create them.
There's a law of conservation of convenience in there somewhere.
The second interesting point:
On page 108 the sentence
No knowledge system exists in a vacuum, it must be rendered
compatible with other systems.
has been underlined and the comment "Not so!" is nearby. I can't agree
with the comment. What about the knowledge systems of the users and
the organizations that use the systems and within which the system
exists? The original system must be able to interoperate with those.
Back to the Index