Everything Goes Every Place It Fits

The traditional taxonomy is monohierarchical – there is one and only one place for every term. This is only sensible for many purposes; no one wants to look up a book in a library catalog only to find out that it is either in Section A or Section F, and no biologist would ever identify…

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Expressing Culture in Coffee Classification

It is always interesting to me when I find taxonomies of interesting and unusual topics. Even if they aren’t true taxonomies, they are typically classifications of some form or another, and they provide information, which is, after all, the goal. The latest find: Gizmodo recently published “A Taxonomy Of Hip Coffee Shop Names.” We have come…

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The Thesaurus as a Domain Model in the Modern World

Source: Dreamstime Nowadays, taxonomies and thesauri are used largely for web navigation and for information search and retrieval. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, it’s largely the digital information revolution that has made their use for information search and retrieval a vital necessity in research, business, and numerous other types of activities. Taxonomies and…

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Taxonomy of Tradition

You already know my interest in finding obscure and odd taxonomies. Remember the hipster taxonomy or the taxonomy of psychopaths? My latest find has taken a bit of a twisted turn but still lies in the world of tradition. It was found on Forward in their article, “The Taxonomy of the Jewish Casket.” While not…

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ICD-10 and Taxonomies

In Canada, the implementation of ICD-10 caused an approximate 50% drop in productivity in rates of coding in the health profession. Reports show that a year after implementation, productivity only returned to 80% of the original ICD-9 baseline. Now, more than a decade since Canada adopted the new coding system, they still have yet to…

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Geeks Rule

Anyone remotely related to the world of information technology has heard it. The term, the label, the veiled and sometimes not so veiled insult. Geek. This interesting and slightly humorous observation came from the Times Colonist out of British Columbia in their article, “Don’t be ashamed of your inner geek.” In the irony of all ironies,…

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Father of Library Science

Father’s Day is coming up soon, so we thought we’d pay homage to Shiyali Ramamrita (S. R.) Ranganathan. As described in the Wikipedia article about him, Ranganathan “is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental…

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Down the Rabbit Hole

As many readers know, the main U.S. standard for taxonomies, thesauri, and other controlled vocabularies is ANSI/NISO Z39.19, Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. The material on vocabulary displays covers types of vocabulary displays that might be unfamiliar. I’m guessing that some of these displays emerged as the result of…

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Those Voices in Your Head

This interesting taxonomy caught my eye partly because it was different and partly because I was relieved other people had voices in their head too. The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest brought some interesting information to us in their article, “A preliminary taxonomy of the voices inside your head.” I joke, of course. Well, mostly.…

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Standing up to Standards

Classification takes on many different styles and approaches. For instance, these videos are a good example of sunspot classification brought to life in visual and yes, audio, if you count the 1980s techno background music. I was warned and feel obligated to do the same for you, monitor your sound when opening. This is a…

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