Taxonomy Is Hard

This is a topic that is at the top of my mind, as I grapple to organise my growing gemini/gopher site. Is it better to index, list a table of contents, search, or try to classify it with the (DDC) Dewey Decimal Classification.

The DDC. It has come under criticism, and librarians have justified a lot of their efforts in moving away from it. I doubt that the effort was justified. It boils down to this: you have to put a book in a library somewhere. And that somewhere has to boil down to a taxonomy.

To illustrate the problem, is a book about programming microcontrollers a book about programming, or is it primarily about microcontrollers? The Arduino Cookbook is in DDC 621.3810285536 (yes, really. That's obviously extreme, though). That's part of the electronics section, which seems fair enough to me. So far so good, But "Beginning MicroPython with the Raspberry Pi Pico: Build Electronics ..." is in section 005.13, which is programming. A completely different place. "Programming with STM32: Getting started with the nucleo board" is in 005.262, which is also programming. But why 005.262 rather than 005.13? It almost seems that whoever is classifying these books has no idea what they're doing ;)

I could go on at length about the confusions I have in trying to place my content. In the end, you have to make a somewhat arbitrary decision and just go with it.

Tables of contents work reasonably well within a book. Subjects are often non-intersecting, so they can be treated separately. For the most part, anyway.

A solution which is fairly reasonable is to index your site. Indices are useful because they allow you to take multiple views on something, thereby eliminating the taxonomy problem.

I'm not a great fan of tagging. It is too much of a scattergun approach to my liking. Perhaps some merit, though.

Then there's textual searching. In fact, that's how I relocated some of my notes. So, text search it is, then? Well, not quite. It seemed like a good system for my site which is focussed. It has problems scaling. I don't want millions of results, a la Google, I want a few relevant ones.

This is even a problem with search engines for the gemini and gopher protocols, where nobody is even trying to game the system. You often end up with a lot of similar stuff at the top which I am not interested in.

Oddly, for gemini, I prefer the "Collaborative Directory of Geminispace" over at gemini://cdg.thegonz.net/ , which is a taxonomy of categories, the very thing that I has doubts about.

So, in summary, it's not easy.

when you can use it as a truck (ie. when it can do what the car isn't adequate for).

The fuzzy line between truck and car isn't a problem when you approach categorization with this mindset. If you see a bank robber fleeing in an El Camino, you can tell the cops they fled in a "truckish car" or a "carish truck"; you don't have to neatly categorize an El Camino as one or the other to get your point across, but the arbitrary categories still help you communicate the idea.

If you're tagging pictures and come across an El Camino, and you don't have a "coupe utility vehicle" tag, you can simply tag the El Camino as both a truck and a car.

Biology. Everything is a fish or nothing is a fish. Trees don't exist. Tomatoes are fruits as are cucumbers, pumpkins, bell peppers, and most things we don't consider fruits. But all fruits are also vegetables. Strawberries are neither straw nor berries. Etc.

When they said the two hardest things in computer science was naming things and cache invalidation, it's partly because naming things is a hard problem in every discipline.