Have you ever tried to classify your personal collection of books or musical CDs? A quite frustrating experience, wasn’t it?
I remember, for instance, that before the advent of MP3s I used to own more than 200 music CDs and I once tried to make a list in order to be able to find that particular CD when I was in the right mood for listening to that particular kind of music (for much that I love Charlie Mingus, there are days in which listening to Pithecantropus Herectus may lead me to schizophrenia). I remember I had to go through the whole collection 30 of 40 times before a decent order was established.
Why was that? For much that I tried to refine my one-level taxonomy there was always a particular album not fitting in any of the categories or, way worse, fitting in many of the categories equally well. I think this is really a key issue. When trying to build taxonomies we tend to think at these cases as exceptions and treat them accordingly. Stated otherwise the underlying axiom of taxonomy is:
1st Axiom of Taxonomy:
The day you’ll find the “right” taxonomy, your entire collection will fit nicely into it
So, the problem was only related to finding the right taxonomy, maybe trying to make it multi-level and hierarchical. My problem was then the right taxonomy for Bob Dylan’s music: was it Rock, Folk-Rock or just Folk? No, it was simply mainly Folk and secondarily Rock! Just like The Beatles where… oh-my-God! That was a little bit more complicate… Yes, they where mainly Rock but… they launched the Psychedelic era (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds) and probably wrote the first Punk Rock song ever (Helter Skelter), they had classical influences… what a mess!! Much better to simply remove the Beatles from the collection… or not?1 And this was nothing compared to the real dilemma I faced in classifying Frank Zappa’s “Yellow Shark”. Was that an example of contemporary classic music or just the experiment of a weird looking, bad smelling rock guy? 2 And, in case I decided for the first, was it better to separate it from the albums he published with the Mothers of Invention or to keep all Zappa's music together under “Rock”? This leads us to a first observation in the application of taxonomy:
1st Empirical Observation about Taxonomy:
The more interesting is an element (to the eyes of the taxonomist) the less will fit into any given taxonomy, for sophisticated it could be
This is the reason why, at the beginning of this reflection, I highlighted the fact that I was talking about a personal collection of music. Because this effect grows together with the knowledge we have about the elements we are trying to classify (and all this leaving behind emotional considerations, which are quite relevant in talking about music).
So, how did I solve the issue? Not surprisingly, by applying a good degree of empiric spirit. In the end, my exercise did have two goals: finding the right music for the right time and make all the CDs fit into my shelves. The second element was the one that saved the day, by ruling out “smarter” taxonomies that could have divided my collection into smaller and smaller bits (leaving most shelves half void).
But being “flawed by shelves” wasn’t the only problem of my taxonomy. At the time of that experiment I was also conducting “musical research” in the sense that I was trying to find and buy as many albums as possible of groups and authors in the Folk and Progressive Rock categories, mainly music of the 70s; as a result of this, those where the two more developed categories, with lots of sub-categories.
This leads me to the second empirical observation:
2nd Empirical Observation about Taxonomies:
For good a given taxonomy may be, will be “outdated” by the time we’ll need to use it to search for elements categorized using it
Wouldn’t be much more effective to be able to define the taxonomy at the time of search? Sounds like science fiction? Maybe…
But now I would like to come to what I see as the biggest problem of any taxonomy: the time we need in order to organize our collection in order to make it fit into the taxonomy. This requires time, which –from an organization’s point of view- means big money.
I know that any expert you may consult on this issue would tell you that that time would be very well invested, resulting in big savings of time at the time of search but, nevertheless, the time of search is usually seen by most of us as too far, or at least way more distant (and thus less fearful) than the next work deadline that “I may not meet if I loose my time in this knowledge management efforts”.
So, wouldn’t it be nice if we could find some tool capable of cataloging automatically our collection, and then presenting us with a proposed categorization (set of meta-data) that we can emend?
I think that both questions may find a positive answer in a tool being:
dynamic: taxonomies must be defined at the time of search, not at the time of data input;
multi-dimensional: the taxonomy must allow for multiple levels of cataloging things, and it should be possible to organize those levels into different hierarchies at the time of search;
automatic (proactive): in the sense of proposing us a possible order for our collection that we may then change where we see fit;
participatory: allows all members in an organization to emend data and metadata, according to the organization’s internal hierarchy, data and metadata workflow (different level of permission to different groups of people).
Such a tool does not exist yet, but it could be built on top of the lessons learned in the fields of Knowledge Building (Knowledge Forum - KF, VirtualU) and Online Collaborative Learning (Lams, Sakai, KF and SoliComm).
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NOTES:
1 Fans of the Rolling Stones are not allowed to reply to question, obviously!
2 Music critics will probably ask themselves this question for another 50 years before filing Zappa right next to Mozart and Bach, under “Greatest Musical Geniuses of All Times”.
