Tag Archives: Classification

Classification is important because it allows us to differentiate things like different types of animals, foods, objects, and other things. It is particularly helpful when it comes to researching, making it easier to search for a specific piece of information by using what is known as a “tag” to separate items to avoid confusion between vastly different topics. The use of tags are mostly associated with the phenomenon, folksonomy. As Dye states, “The process is simple enough: Users assign a name, or tag, to any image, article, blog, bookmark, or URL.” In essence, a folksonomy is a “home-grown” taxonomy, one where users generate “metadata” to classify things for easier retrieval. The importance of classification is not to be underestimated, seeing as it is used on a daily basis on even the most mundane levels.

Classification is a way in which we can associate different topics or materials in order to make our lives easier. Just look at the classification system in Biology, without it trying to comprehend and search for a certain species would be downright impossible. There are so many things we have to keep track of that simply would not be possible without a system in place that allows for simple access or navigation.

Of course, the act of classification can be rather tricky. There are so many things to keep track of and so many similar products that putting each into their own category is not a simple task. This why we need things like metadata or having people dedicated to solely working with classification. Imagine if keywords did not exist when trying to search for something online, you could probably find a lot of information but how much of it would actually be relevant to what you are specifically searching for?

Think of how we look at other people, we classify them by gender, by race, by residency, by physical features, by personality traits. Classification is important because it is something basic and ingrained into us, it makes our life simpler and we do it with everything.

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.