Using any formal classification system to classify essays assumes that the person that wants to find an essay already fully understands that formal classification scheme. I doubt that the majority of people who are looking for essays would know the ACM Computing Classification System. This isn't to say that the ACMCCS is a bad system, as it seems quite comprehensive. It's just that it would take me a while just to come up with the formal category that I thought that the essay I was looking for, might fall under.
It would be like trying to find essays about whales, where the essays were categorized by the formal taxonomic structure of all life on earth. I wouldn't have a clue, and it would take me some effort to just find the category "Cetacea Balaenidae" in the taxonomy of life, let alone finding the specific essay I wanted about whales. It would be more useful and efficient for the average person to classify the whale essays under "big fish", and perhaps "large water-dwelling mammals" as well. To make categorization easy, the categories should be intuitive. For information discovery, intuitive categories are much more important than being concise or formal. A person searching for an essay shouldn't have to learn a whole categorization scheme just to be able to find a particular essay. J's penchant for renaming certain programming concepts as English parts-of-speech makes keyword searching for specific concepts even more hit-and-miss than in many other programming languages. J users would probably classify verb-building essays under the category "verbs". Essays on building verbs would then likely be completely missed by a novice looking for ways to define basic J programs. An intuitive classification scheme would also put those same essays under at least one or more other categories - something like "programs" as well as perhaps "subroutines". Verbs may or may not meet all the formal criteria for a subroutine, but I would wager to say that more people coming to J from other languages would find the program-building essays by looking at the "subroutine" category,rather than the "verb" category. In information discovery, intuitiveness is more important than exact formalism. Different people will have different ideas about how a specific essay should be classified, so any many-essays-to-one-single-category scheme will cause a certain set of users to completely overlook essays that were classified in a category that they didn't think of, or know about. What one needs instead, is a one-essay-to-many-categories classification scheme where an essay can be classified in many different ways, depending on the worldview and vocabulary of the user. Thus comes the idea of categorizing by collaboration. In this way, you get the collective vision of many users, both novice and expert, classifying each essay in the ways and the words that a wide range of users might understand. Skip On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 7:31 AM, Brian Schott <[email protected]>wrote: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Classification_systems > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Computing_Classification_System > > Would the ACM system, or part of it, be a starting place? > > > > -- > (B=) > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Skip Cave Cave Consulting LLC Phone: 214-460-4861 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
