| 5th November 2007 |
| Venue |
University College London
|
| [Talks, presentations, recordings] |
ISKO UK held its second KOKO (KOnnecting KOmmunities) event from 14:00 - 20:00 on 5th November entitled Ranganathan Revisited: Facets for the future. The intention was to explore the current status of faceted classification from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. The event was sponsored by Factiva from Dow Jones and the venue was provided by the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) at University College London UCL). Eighty-one people attended.
S. R. Ranganathan was the Indian librarian and academic who, in the 1930s, developed the theory of faceted classification. Faceted classification is an approach to presenting and organizing knowledge based on the identification of fundamental subject categories (‘facets') that allows the combination of relevant values from one or more facets to define a compound subject with great precision.
Read a full report by Bob Bater.
We are grateful to Conrad Taylor for recording and photographing the event.
Talks
 Vanda Broughton [PDF] [MP3] |
Meccano, molecules and the organization of knowledge: the continuing contribution of S. R. Ranganathan Vanda, lecturer at SLAIS and ISKOUK Chairperson, provided an account of the origins of faceted classification in the work of the eminent Indian scholar and librarian S. R. Ranganathan in the 1930s and described how its influence persists today. Ranganathan himself derived inspiration for his Colon Classification from Meccano, which he came across in a London toy shop whilst studying at UCL in 1924. Vanda, on the other hand, proposed that the molecular model is perhaps a better representation... read more in the event report. |
 Claudio Gnoli [PDF] [MP3] |
‘Classic’ vs. 'freely' faceted classification Claudio Gnoli of the University of Pavia in Italy and Chair of ISKO Italy, explored the relative merits of classic 'faceted classification' (FC) and 'freely faceted classification' (FFC). In classic FC, the facets (and their relationships) which might be combined to express a compound subject, are restricted to those prescribed as inherent in the subject area. FC is therefore largely bounded by and restricted to a specific subject area. At the other extreme, free classification (as in the Web or folksonomies) allows the combination of values from multiple, disparate domains where the relationships among the elements are often indeterminate, and the semantics obscure. Claudio described how punched cards were an early example of free classification, and cited the coordination of dogs : postmen : bites as one where the absence of defined relationships made the semantics ambiguous... read more in the event report. |
  Mark Stapleton & Matt Adams [PDF] [MP3] |
Faceted categorisation for the corporate desktop: visualisation and interaction using metadata to enhance user experience Mark Stapleton and Matt Adamson began their presentation by describing how Dow Jones' Factiva range of information services processed an average of 170,000 documents every day, drawn from over 10,000 sources in 22 languages. These documents are categorized within five facets: Company, Subject, Industry, Region and Language. The digital feeds received from information providers undergo a series of processing stages, initially to prepare them for automatic categorization and then to format them ready for distribution. The categorization stage is able to handle 98% of documents automatically, the remaining 2% requiring some form of human intervention. Depending on the source, categorization can involve any combination of 'Autocoding', 'Dictionary-based Categorizing', 'Rules-based Coding' or 'Manual Coding'... read more in the event report. |
  Jan Wyllie & Simon Eaton [PDF] [MP3] |
Faceted classification as an intelligence analysis tool Jan and Simon are collaborating in the development of a collaborative web-based resource to be called The Energy Centre (TEC). TEC will allow the collaborative collection of clips relating to all aspects of the energy sector. The clips will be stored and organized in such a way that they are not only easily searchable, but can serve as the basis for content analysis - defined as 'a technique for systematic inference from communications'. Jan began by explaining that it was while working as an intelligence analyst at the Canadian Trend Report in Montreal, that he learned about content analysis, a classic taxonomy-based intelligence research methodology... read more in the event report. |
 Jeroen Wester [PDF] [MP3] |
AutoFocus: An Open-source Facet-Driven Enterprise Search Solution In the final presentation of the afternoon, Jeroen Wester of Aduna described the main features of their open-source, facet-driven enterprise search solution, AutoFocus. AutoFocus is based upon and exploits the advantages of Semantic Web technologies, in particular RDF (Resource Description Framework), although a bewildering variety of related technologies - XML, SOAP, SKOS, OWL - are also employed. In addition to providing components for metadata-based data integration and cross-silo search and navigation in a single enterprise search solution, AutoFocus offers the advantage of being open-source, meaning that its source code is freely available for customization... read more in the event report. |