Some interesting thoughts on the role and importance of cataloging and classification in the digital age.
Two Paragraphs from the Article:
But in the digital age, a formalized set of rules for categorizing and classifying information may no longer be necessary or helpful. Digital objects are not discoverable on a shelf or in any other physical place; linear numbers, and linearity itself, have little meaning in this new world. The subject matter, once the preserve of professional catalogers, can be now adduced by general readers and, as importantly, linked by their interpretive readings to other structured data. This reading/interpreting/reclassifying is suggestive of aspects of the traditional scholarly process itself, though performed within an astonishingly accelerated timeframe.
One approach that capitalizes on the Web and its ability to join disparate data objects is called linked data, often coupled with the term semantic web. With the ability to create incredibly rich and nuanced methods of connoting the meaningful linkages between and among information sources, our understanding of these objects will presumably become more sophisticated. That, at least, is hoped for. If the semantic web is to be realized, our approach to classifying knowledge should be prudently moved from a relatively fixed set of notations to one that better approximates our relationship to the stars. For thousands of years we have looked up at nighttime skies and seen named groupings of light—for example, Orion, the Dipper, Pegasus—at least in the Western tradition. Peoples in other countries and societies impose very different images: their star formations can be wildly different from ours. They see the night sky within the context of other narratives, legends, and events.
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