Course Description: Introduction to issues in organization of information and documents including: analysis of intellectual and physical characteristics of documents; principles and practice in surrogate creation, including standards and selection of metadata elements; theory of classification, including semantic relationships and facet analysis; creation of controlled vocabularies; and display and arrangement.
Classification by Colors
My core course in organization of information required accommodation of the need for structure to achieve meaningful organization with the need for flexible semantics to assign topics and arrangement in semantically effective ways. An exceptionally painful trade-off required assignment of numerical values in enumerated schemes for ease of identifying classifications.
This convenience creates a problem if new values must be interpolated to update the scheme to describe new resources or to describe familiar resources in new ways not considered with the structure was defined. The order of attributes must reflects their semantic relationships to one another (the very reason for using an enumerated structure), so additions may not be simply tacked onto the end of a list. This interpolation disrupts the enumeration sequence unless it was designed to leave empty slots for later additions. My solution was to assign hex values for colors as enumerators for the values within my attribute structure
The linked blog post reproduces a post on the class discussion board. It demonstrates careful analysis of classification issues and problems along with willingness to consider innovative solutions. It may also indicate a willingness to chase a problem as far as it runs and drag back a solution, however far the chase. And it indicates an appreciation of nonstandard semantic indicators such as use of mixed-color stripes in place of or in addition to common text labels.
Blog post – Category: Information Processing – All Coursework
Faceted Classification Scheme
Most work in this class involved collaboration with other students via online discussion boards. This reflection paper discusses my take-away from that process for an assignment to develop a scheme for faceted classification scheme for a collection of cookbooks. A rigid length requirement for the paper challenged me to present an in-depth discussion in a concise way. The paper demonstrates a capacity for detailed yet flexible thinking to match the semantic complexity of the resource domain being described with the needs of an assumed user base for retrieving those resources.
Complete paper – Category: Information Processing – All Coursework