shiny things in messy little piles

Month: July 2007 (Page 2 of 2)

TQR — a little bit of Denton’s How to Make a Faceted Classification (and Put It on the Web)

This morn­ing’s dur­ing the slog up tread­mill hill I read through Wm. Den­ton’s How to Make a Faceted Clas­si­fi­ca­tion and Put It on the Web.

I’ll have a lot more to say about it in a cou­ple of days. (Beware.)

This morn­ing I only want to point you to the sec­tion 4.2: Faceted Nav­i­ga­tion: Three Ques­tions and Four Prin­ci­ples. I love his fourth principle:

The URL is the nota­tion for the clas­si­fi­ca­tion. It should be com­pact, comprehensible,and editable. When a knowl­edge­able user exam­ines it he or she should be able to under­stand how it is built and how edit­ing it could lead to oth­er entities.

Tech­ni­cal­ly this can be a roy­al pain in the ass to cre­ate and many will argue that it is only use­ful for the uber-geeks. But think on it. How often have you gone to a book­marked page and then chopped off it’s tail or altered a word or two to get some place when you did­n’t feel like typ­ing in some big ass ole URL?

Bliss…

TQR- A Simplified Model for Faceted Classification — Not for the Faint of Heart

This lit­tle gem is not for the faint of heart. I wish “A Sim­pli­fied Mod­el for Facet Clas­si­fi­ca­tion” had been around when I was strug­gling with Ran­ganathan’s colon clas­si­fi­ca­tion scheme in library school. I, and I believe many oth­er LIS stu­dents of my time, were entire­ly put off the idea of faceted clas­si­fi­ca­tion by the expe­ri­ence. A shame real­ly because facets are one of the most use­ful tools for wran­gling mas­sive amounts of stuff that has too many things in com­mon to make full text based search­ing useful.

Dr. Spi­ter­i’s overview (and meld­ing) of Ran­ganathan’s work and the lat­er work of the Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Research Group takes a bit of the sting out the mem­o­ries of all those Canons, Pos­tu­lates, and Prin­ci­ples. (Not to men­tion the den­si­ty of R’s language.)

If you need refresh­er on the basic tenets of faceted clas­si­fi­ca­tion this is a good place to get it. But is you don’t already have some back­ground in clas­si­fi­ca­tion you’ll be lost in minutes.

I’m still look­ing for exam­ples of using facets to describe sys­tems (rather than retrieve infor­ma­tion.) Opaque request, huh? I guess I’ll just have to go and build one of my own.

Blue Bin Virus

We live in a place that has “curb­side recy­cling.” Kind of a stretch con­sid­er­ing the near­est curb is 9 miles from here but… Every oth­er week we put a huge blue wheel­ie bin in the buck­et of the trac­tor and haul it down to the coun­ty road to be picked up. (The green bins are for trash and they go out every week.)

a-bin

Being every oth­er week there are of course some Thurs­day evenings when the most press­ing ques­tion is “Is this a recy­cling week?” There’s a lit­tle cal­en­dar in the fridge that answers this ques­tion when we’re not sure.

A cou­ple of weeks ago we duti­ful­ly loaded up the big blue bin and hauled it out to the road where it joined it’s fel­lows. The next day on the way to PO I saw lots of blue bins care­ful­ly lined up along the coun­ty road — all as it should be.

many-bins

Until Fri­day night (okay, Sat­ur­day morn­ing) when I took the trac­tor down to the road to pick up the bins. Uh, the recy­cling bin is still full. What’s with that? Hey all the recy­cling bins are full. Idiots did­n’t pick up, I hate that now I have to haul a full bin back and it’s full and we won’t have any­where to throw the paper… and you get the idea.

But before I go off all pissed on some poor phone-answering cus­tomer ser­vice dweeb maybe I should check the sched­ule. Uh… huh?… real­ly? It’s not a recy­cling week. Says so right here on the sched­ule. So what’s up with that?

I have got­ten the week wrong before and either not tak­en the bin down when I should or tak­en it down when I should­n’t. What makes this inci­dent weird is that so many peo­ple put out their bins on the wrong week. Not just the five of us who live up here on our (dirt) road but peo­ple all up and down the coun­ty road. It was a vast line of big blue bins. Why?

A lit­tle thought and a lit­tle house­hold dis­cus­sion answered the question.

Me: Did you check the cal­en­dar yesterday?

Him: No, did you?

Me: No. But every­one else had put their big blue bins out so I took ours to the road.

Just enough peo­ple made the mis­take of tak­ing the big blue bin to the road on the wrong day to start a cascade.

And a lot of those bins stayed right there in their nice tidy lines wait­ing for recy­cling week, next Thursday.

Thanks to Black Dog for the photos.

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