Classification and Findability

Just as precision is not the same as accuracy, classification is not the same as findability. For years, I believed that classifying something into a category would enable me to find once again in the future. Certainly, that was the primary motivation of my early involvement with classification schemes and systems. Often, that's the case, but it's not necessarily true.

How often do we decide to put something, like a mortgage document or car insurance papers, in a "safe place", then forget where we put them? Did we mis-classify or mis-place ... or both? What about "hiding things in plain sight"? If it's a "thing", there may be a technical solution to making mis-placed things findable by identifying them with 'RFID tags', just as some people may ring their mobile phone to hear where it is.

But how could we make ideas findable? I suppose it's by giving them 'word tags'. The problem is which word tag or tags to use. What about all of those synonyms? The categories of Roget's Thesaurus may be a place to start. This list of categories may help, but one may have to scan all one-thousand-or-so to find the most appropriate word. Even then you might not identify it. In my own experience, the most effective way to improve findability is to memorise all or most of the categories, such as Dewey's 10/~100/~1000 categories. This is similar to creating a controlled vocabulary and memorising it.

To an extent, perhaps we could start this by agreeing a simple subset of a language, such as Basic English. Basic English is said to take only seven weeks to learn, yet is rich enough to enable the Bible to be translated as the Bible in Basic English. (This goal may have been part of the reason for my early interest in Loglan/Lojban. I was one of those 'weirdos' that bought the first Loglan Dictionary in its beautiful brown binding.) What may yet need to be proved is whether we could describe 'anything' using a controlled vocabulary of 850 to 1000 words used in a faceted way. (This may be similar to what librarians have tried to do with Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), which began with Dewey's categories and then used them in a faceted fashion.)

Even if we all memorised a set of word tags and learned the analytico-synthetic technique of faceted classification, would it improve our ability to classify things ... and make them easier to find? Possibly, but it's hard to imagine that very many people would be willing to do it. We can't afford to forget Steve Krug's reminder in the title of his book, Don't Make Me Think, which, to an extent, amounts to 'KISSability'.