Monthly Archives: October 2016

The importance of classification in today’s society is very high.  Everyone tends to rely on it when searching for different material.  Dye explains in her article “Folksonomy: A Game of High-tech (and Highstakes) Tag” that classification also known as folksonomy is very beneficial; it is generated metadata taken from multiple sources, tagging digital information with their own searchable keywords.  This idea of organizing information in this particular way has been sought out early on in life.  Wright states in his article “Family trees and the tree of life” that, “Even the most seemingly divergent cultures seem to employ almost identical strategies for organizing information, following a pattern that Berlin dubbed ‘ethnobiological rank,’ or the use of hierarchical categories to describe the characteristics of plants and animals”.  See classification has been around for a long time and continues to increasingly become broader.

Without classification it will be much harder to do any research on certain topics when only given a short period of time to complete it.  Imagine life without folksonomy or classification, it would take many hours to finish a simple search on the internet.  This is why some believe that classification is needed in today’s society.  Dye said that, “The richness and participation of the communities around these folksonomies are, in large part, what fuel interest in them”.  Not only are we sharing insight on the same interests but we are building our knowledge from each others thoughts and facts that is put out for the world to see.

Classification is very important when it comes to researching things. Classification helps with organzing data. The organization can enable “Classification Taxonomy”. When researching you should tag your data to help find the information quickly and efficiently. This is where metadata starts being implemented. Badke discusses the importance of using metadata. Without using metadata it causes your search to have a lot of irrelevant results. This now slows down the process of getting the information you need because you now have to skim and cut down all the unnecessary information you don’t need. Classification is not only helpful for researching but for food, animal, and people. It is important to classify yourself and to determine who you are as a person.

Classification is defined as the act of organizing and categorizing something based on their similarities. For example, a cat and a dog would be classified as a mammal and an animal. However because cats and dogs are of different species, they would go under different categories.

According to Alex Wright in Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages, humans have used classification (specifically biological classification) for the past 100,000 years. Without it, they could not have survived for as long as they did because it would be impossible to know what plants are poisonous to consume or what animals are dangerous to approach. As Wright states, “the practice of biological classification ranked as one of humanity’s most essential culture pursuits.”

William Badke in Research Strategies: Finding Your Way through the Information Fog explains the importance of classification when searching for information online. A common method of searching for information is Google because it easily locates data based on the words and letters you type. However, it may be difficult to find exactly you are looking for because of how massive and unspecified the results are.

A superior method of searching for information lies in databases. According to Badke, databases use metadata, defined as data that gives information about other data to locate exactly what is searched. For example, a search of “elderly healthcare survey” on a database will contain more accurate and useful information compared to search engines such as Google. Overall, with databases, students can find research faster and more accurately due to metadatas usage of classification.