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From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: NewsGroup Renaming
Message-ID: <1989Oct27.164842.14655@world.std.com>
Date: 27 Oct 89 16:48:42 GMT
Organization: The World
Lines: 45


Renaming is worth considering but nothing I've seen so far (I may have
missed some discussion) seems worthy of consideration.

The field of formal subject classification is several hundred years
old. All I've seen here are strange, barely amateurish attempts to
reinvent this field from scratch, off the top of people's heads.

Consider systems like the Dewey Decimal System and Library of
Congress's System. For what purpose do you think these people have
been honing these systems for centuries now (hell of a sentence,
sorry)?

*Subject Classification*

I say if we rename again we do it for real and get some professional
librarians and other knowledge classification experts involved.

Then what we do might just be useful in a broader sense than this odd
collection of bits and bytes we call the USENET. Otherwise it'll all
just fall apart as soon as the first exception comes along (as it's
doing right now.)

I *DEMAND* (strong words :-) that whatever proposal is accepted for
the next USENET renaming be publishable in a refereed library sciences
journal, or equivalent.

Do the whole job or find someone who will.

P.S. Library of Congress and others do use fairly onerous-looking
digit strings as classification id's. Before someone objects to this,
there's absolutely no reason the software couldn't map that into
english-like strings for a user interface. In fact, the abstraction is
useful in that it can then be mapped by user interfaces into other
languages.

Anyhow, it's the STRUCTURE we're after, from there we could get
creative with how it looks to a user.  But at least we'll have some
confidence that we did the best we could. And it might even survive
the next sci.aquaria proposal.
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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