The Future of Categorization?

March 18th, 2005

I take a lot of heat for my “e-mail is dead” comments, but there is another theme that has been pervasive in my thinking these past few days that many librarians may not agree with. Today, after watching the speciality search engines presentations at CIL, which included a presntation by the CEO of Vivisimo, I was chatting with a nice woman about Clusty. We then talked about subject-classification taxonomies and how Clusty creates them on the fly (I think).

I then brought up the “human aspect of classification”, which I think is direly missing from traditional classification schema. Not only do people (our users) classify items differently, they search for items differently. The subjective nature of classifying data has it’s problems, but this is where the collective knowledge base can come in. If the “wisdom of the crowds” are smarter than a chosen few, why not use this method in retrieving data? These are only initial thoughts and I’m sure that my theories need tweaking, but I just wanted to get it out there for possible discussion.

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