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Classifications and Categories generally need to be adjusted to accommodate the accumulation of material and the related abilities to filter and process the referenced items. The modern improvements in computer and communications technologies exacerbate this need by extending the ability to classify items well beyond the historical dominions of librarians, biologists and botanists, and geologists. This is especially evident in the behaviours of participants in Internet community sites such as "del.ici.us" and "flickr" where significant efforts are underway to share bookmarks and photographs by tagging them with various forms of metadata.
Assuming that the rapid development of modern technologies is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, it may be more effective to consider ways of merging or cross-referencing various classification systems, than to merely engage in creating yet more divergent categories. After all, effective and efficient human communication fundamentally requires a common, shared understanding of a basic vocabulary of words and numeric representations, before these can be expanded into the larger patterns of expressions and terms that can be used to index, filter and retrieve existing information.
It may be worth our while (an consistent with Meatball's barn-raising mission) to collect some examples of existing classification systems and to consider various ways in which they could be cross-referenced or, ideally, standardized.
- One such example of two systems that are each quite useful in their own right are the Dewey Decimal Classification and the Library of Congress classification systems that are used by libraries.