1.10: Organizing This Book

Devising concepts, methods, and technologies for describing and organizing resources have been essential human activities for millennia, evolving both in response to human needs and to enable new ones. Organizing Systems enabled the development of civilization, from agriculture and commerce to government and warfare. Today Organizing Systems are embedded in every domain of purposeful activity, including research, education, law, medicine, business, science, institutional memory, sociocultural memory, governance, public accountability, as well as in the ordinary acts of daily living.

With the World Wide Web and ubiquitous digital information, along with effectively unlimited processing, storage and communication capability, millions of people create and browse websites, blog, tag, tweet, and upload and download content of all media types without thinking “I am organizing now” or “I am retrieving now.” Writing a book used to mean a long period of isolated work by an author followed by the publishing of a completed artifact, but today some books are continuously and iteratively written and published through the online interactions of authors and readers. When people use their smart phones to search the web or run applications, location information transmitted from their phone is used to filter and reorganize the information they retrieve. Arranging results to make them fit the user’s location is a kind of computational curation, but because it takes place quickly and automatically we hardly notice it.

Likewise, almost every application that once seemed predominantly about information retrieval is now increasingly combined with activities and functions that most would consider to be information organization. Google, Microsoft, and other search engine operators have deployed millions of computers to analyze billions of web pages and millions of books and documents to enable the almost instantaneous retrieval of published or archival information. However, these firms increasingly augment this retrieval capability with information services that organize information in close to real-time. Further, the selection and presentation of search results, advertisements, and other information can be tailored for the person searching for information using his implicit or explicit preferences, location, or other contextual information.

Taken together, these innovations in technology and its application mean that the distinction between information organization and information retrieval that is often manifested in academic disciplines and curricula is much less important than it once was.

This book has few sharp divisions between information organization (IO) and information retrieval (IR) topics. Instead, it explains the key concepts and challenges in the design and deployment of Organizing Systems in a way that continuously emphasizes the relationships and tradeoffs between IO and IR. The concept of the Organizing System highlights the design dimensions and decisions that collectively determine the extent and nature of resource organization and the capabilities of the processes that compare, combine, transform and interact with the organized resources.

Navigating The Discipline of Organizing

Design Decisions in Organizing Systems

This chapter introduces six broad design questions or dimensions whose intertwined answers define an Organizing System: What, why, how much, when, how, and where. This framework for describing and comparing Organizing Systems overcomes the biases and conservatism built into familiar categories like libraries and museums while enabling us to describe them as design patterns. We can then use these patterns to support inter-disciplinary work that cuts across categories and applies knowledge about familiar domains to unfamiliar ones.

Activities in Organizing Systems

Developing a view that brings together how we organize as individuals with how libraries, museums, governments, research institutions, and businesses create Organizing Systems requires that we generalize the organizing concepts and methods from these different domains. Activities in Organizing Systems surveys a wide variety of Organizing Systems and describes four activities or functions shared by all of them: selecting resources, organizing resources, designing resource-based interactions and services, and maintaining resources over time.

Resources in Organizing Systems

The design of an Organizing System is strongly shaped by what is being organized, the first of the six design decisions we introduced earlier in “What Is Being Organized?”. To enable a broad perspective on this fundamental issue we use resource to refer to anything being organized, an abstraction that we can apply to physical things, digital things, information about either of them, or web-based services or objects. Resources in Organizing Systems discusses the challenges and methods for identifying the resources in an Organizing System in great detail and emphasizes how these decisions reflect the goals and interactions that must be supported—the “why” design decisions introduced in “Why Is It Being Organized?”.

Resource Description and Metadata

The principles by which resources are organized and the kinds of services and interactions that can be supported for them largely depend on the nature and explicitness of the resource descriptions. This “how much description” design question was introduced in “How Much Is It Being Organized?”; Resource Description and Metadata presents a systematic process for creating effective descriptions and analyzes how this general approach can be adapted for different types of Organizing Systems.

Describing Relationships and Structures

An important aspect of organizing a collection of resources is describing the relationships between them. Describing Relationships and Structures introduces the specialized vocabulary used to describe semantic relationships between resources and between the concepts and words used in resource descriptions. It also discusses the structural relationships within multipart resources and between resources, like those expressed as citations or hypertext links.

Categorization: Describing Resource Classes and Types

Groups or sets of resources with similar or identical descriptions can be treated as equivalent, making them members of an equivalence class or category. Identifying and using categories are essential human activities that take place automatically for perceptual categories like “red things” or “round things.” Categorization is deeply ingrained in language and culture, and we use linguistic and cultural categories without realizing it, but categorization can also be a deeply analytic and cognitive process. Categorization: Describing Resource Classes and Types reviews theories of categorization from the point of view of how categories are created and used in Organizing Systems.

Classification: Assigning Resources to Categories

The terms categorization and classification are often used interchangeably but they are not the same. Classification is applied categorization—the assignment of resources to a system of categories, called classes, using a predetermined set of principles.Classification: Assigning Resources to Categories discusses the broad range of how classifications are used in Organizing Systems. These include enumerative classification, faceted classification, activity-based classification, and computational classification. Because classification and standardization are closely related, the chapter also analyzes standards and standards-making as they apply to Organizing Systems.

The Forms of Resource Descriptions

The Forms of Resource Descriptions complements the conceptual and methodological perspective on the creation of resource descriptions with an implementation perspective. The Forms of Resource Descriptions reviews a range of metamodels for structuring descriptions, with particular emphasis on Semantic Web—where each of these three metamodels is most appropriate.

Interactions with Resources

When Organizing Systems overlap, intersect, or are combined (temporarily or permanently), differences in resource descriptions can make it difficult or impossible to locate resources, access them, or otherwise impair their use. Interactions with Resources reviews some of the great variety of concepts and techniques that different domains use when interacting with resources in Organizing Systems—integration, interoperability, data mapping, crosswalks, mash-ups, and so on. Interactions are characterized by the layers of resource properties they use: instance, collection-based, derived, or properties combined from different resources. Interactions with Resources extends the idea of an information organization—information retrieval continuum, and describes information retrieval interactions (and others) in terms of information organization (i.e., resource description) requirements.

The Organizing System Roadmap

The Organizing System Roadmap complements the descriptive perspective of chapters 2-10 with a more prescriptive one that analyzes the design choices and tradeoffs that must be made in different phases in an Organizing System’s life cycle. System life cycle models exhibit great variety, but we use a generic four-phase model that distinguishes a domain identification and scoping phase, a requirements phase, a design and implementation phase, and an operational phase.

Case Studies

In Case Studies we use the model described in The Organizing System Roadmap to guide the analysis of studies that span the range of Organizing Systems, and make reference to the principles, guidelines, vocabulary, and models discussed in the preceding chapters.