^^Classificare; esempi.

Nome proprio e nome di famiglia

Nell'identificazione delle persone:

• il nome di famiglia e' l'elemento di uguaglianza
• il nome proprio e' l'elemento di diversita'

Catalogo librario

A library catalog, for example, assumes that for any new book, its logical place already exists within the system, even before the book was published.

(ref: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

That strategy of designing categories to cover possible cases in advance is what I'm primarily concerned with, because it is both widely used and badly overrated in terms of its value in the digital world.)

What's being optimized (by a catalog system) is number of books on the shelf, not knowledge.

DSM-IV, the 4th version of the psychiatrists' Diagnostic and Statistical Manua

, is a classic example of an classification scheme that works because of these characteristics:

• Expert catalogers
• Authoritative source of judgment
• Coordinated users
• Expert users

The Web is mainly notable for two things

• the way it ignored most of the theories of hypertext and rich metadata,
• and how much better it works than any of the proposed alternatives. (The Yahoo/Google strategies I mentioned earlier also split along those lines.)