Lars Aronsson wrote:
In the field of digital libraries, there is a subculture that likes to discuss "thesauri and ontologies", especially bordering on the "semantic web" subculture. It seems to me that most people in the thesauri and ontologies subculture are from Germany and have some kind of German library science background. I'm talking about stuff like http://www.ecdl2003.org/ecdl.tutorials.html#tutorial4 and http://www.jcdl2004.org/tutorials.htm#t2a
I'm not sure this is purely a national issue: there's quite a few US researchers working on "sematic web" stuff, and it's one of the trendy areas of research these days. Nobody seriously defends the Dewey Decimal system as a modern classification system---its defenders mostly cite reasons of continuity and compatibility with existing categorizations (such as physical library holdings), and say that these outweigh any deficiencies, as it is, in their viewpoint, suboptimal but still more than good enough.
(Of course, there's lots of viewpoints falling to any side of that one.)
I do think ad-hoc categorization is going to end up mostly useless. Either it's going to end up hierarchical, but with a rather idiosyncratic and arbitrary hierarchy, or it's going to be very inclusive and overlapping, with most articles fitting under a large number of categories. Nearly all medical articles can go under [[Category:Alternative medicine]] as well, for example; [[The Bible]] can go under about a million categories relating to Christian sects, or even non-Christian religions, sects, groups, cults, and all manner of other organizations that have something to say about the Bible; etc.
-Mark