Author Archives: cindia2010

If it wasn’t for classification the world would be a chaotic mess. Classification is very important to us, so important that it naturally occurs in the world. Classification makes us who we are and makes the world a better place to understand. The exact definition of classification is “the action or process of classifying something according to shared qualities or characteristics.” yet other people have different definitions and examples of different kinds of classifications as well. According to Badke classification can be seen in search engines. A bad example of classification he talks about is google. he says it is nothing more than a search engine. Google itself doesn’t understand what you type it just matches the words you type to any random searches on the internet. A good example of classification is the library databases because they use controlled vocabularies and key word searches to understand what you want to find. This is because everything in the library including their search engines are categorized by genre, type , and a specific number.

Dye talks about using two types of classification systems in the database world as well. He talks about taxonomy and folksonomy, He says they both might work for search engines but not really and this is why librarians continue to use the Dewey decimal system. Taxonomy is the branch of science concerned with classification, especially of organisms; systematics. Yet one of the negative things about using this for database is that it is a top-down system because it rely s heavily on centralized control of the structure and vocabulary. Folksonomy is a user-generated system of classifying and organizing online content into different categories by the use of metadata such as electronic tags. According to dye this is a better searching engine because individuals have their own tags and they can make sense out of their own words and get related topics to their tags.

Wright talks about natural taxonomy in which he observed in the Peruvian rain forest. But what was more impressing was that taxonomy classification is much more natural to us then we thought. Such is seen in the tribal cultures around the world. Classification in indigenous people create high classification system very similar to how plants and animal “families” divide. Wright says that classification is in out genetics. and without thinking we use it everyday.

Overall I think classification is natural in human behavior and no data base can accomplish it like animals, plants, and humans do but we can try to use certain classification systems to try to make searching for information much easier.