Assignment #4B: Classification

Although classification refers sometimes to categorization, the term carries more complex forms in terms of research. While it seems simple to search online and find relevant results on what we are searching for, a lot of details go into interpreting or finding those results. As suggested in the book and the article, when we search, we search different ways depending on the search engines we use, sometimes we get more results than we need, sometimes we get irrelevant results or sometimes we do not get any results, as underlines Badke in the book, “-search is a messy thing, often leaving us with far more results that we don’t need than the few we do”. Noting that all the information from the search is already classified in databases, this classification can be proper to specific search engines. However, the classification used in the databases is important because it determines the efficiency of the results we get and their organization, for instance, as recommends Badke, adding metadata helps categorize data, narrow and specify our results, which results in a much-sophisticated retrieval capability. He states that “any database is only as useful as its retrieval capability”. The article “Folksonomy: a game of high-tech (and high-stakes) tag” and Badke both highlight the difference between a classified information where someone decides the different classifications, which results in a better search (controlled vocabularies); and a more flexible way of organizing the information using tags where everyone can create their own classification. In the later one, there is no organization, for example in Flickr, people use different tag names for the same category of photos.