Information Research Weblog

I've been corresponding with Francis J. Devadason (now retired to farming in Kansas!) about the failure of those promoting the notion of the 'semantic Web' to take proper notice of developments in classification stretching back to Kaiser's 'Systematic indexing' of 1911 (if there is anyone out there who knows who has my copy of that book, I'd be glad to have it back, please!) through Ranganathan's 'faceted classification', to Battacharyya's POPSI.

Those who don't know what I'm talking about may care to read some of the papers mentioned by Devadason:

• After the dot-bomb: getting Web information retrieval right this time, by Marcia J. Bates. [First Monday, 7(7)]
• Ranganathan had SEVEN facets and not FIVE – Semantic Web & Facet Analysis, by Francis J. Devadason
• Faceted indexing based system for organizing and accessing Internet resources, by Francis. J. Devadason, Neelawat Intaraksa, Ponprapa Patamawongjariya , and Kavita Desai
• Metadata: think outside the docs!, by Bob Doyle [eContent, May 3, 2005]
• The rise of ontologies or the reinvention of classification, by Dagobert Soergel [Journal of the American Society for Information Science. October 1999; 50(12): 1119-1120.]