At the United States Social Forum I met a linguist and Drupal user who told me that taxonomy could implement any kind of classification he could imagine.
Now I think I'm beginning to see what he means. CMT just might unleash a latent, awesome power in taxonomy (if it does I'll be sure to tell the Drupal for Evil group).
Taxonomy doesn't have to be hierarchical or flat. Categorization can be mesh, lattice, or called most simply, network.
First, some background. As a holder of the radical belief that liberty, justice, our well-being and the hope of progress require basic human equality of power, it's hurt me every time in one of these posts where I had to use the word hierarchy. I couldn't think of any alternative. Instead I kept telling myself these are terms, not people, but it didn't help much. ;-)
In fact, just as the "flat hierarchy," of which the current free tagging option is the most common example, is really no hierarchy at all, the "multiple hierarchy" option, which permits terms to belong to n number of parents, breaks the mold to present the potential of being non-hierarchical.
For instance anarchism can belong to revolutionary movements which can belong to autonomy which can belong to anarchism – a loop.
Any and all of these terms can also be root level general categories and intermeshed with any number of other terms, like cooperation, voluntarism, and organization perhaps all belonging to both anarchism and revolutionary movements.
This is not something any single user or administrator is likely to do. But it's something a whole bunch of people tagging and arranging content might come up with.
Drupal's core taxonomy has the functionality (and we haven't even mentioned related terms). Community managed taxonomy will try to provide the user interface. And perhaps a drawing module could help with the last piece: the display of a complex, interconnected, network of terms (and perhaps also the nodes that belong to them).
For what this might look like, I refer you to the reason I was emboldened to think the above through: I found my people.
- http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NetworkVsHierarchy
- http://chandlerproject.org/bin/view/Projects/BrowserDesign (pictures!)
- From a comment by a developer there, MimiYin, on "Why fixed hierarchies present a workflow bottlneck":
We've talked about how the file folder metaphor misdirects users to first try to make fine-grain (where does this go?) decisions before making coarse-grain (processing) decisions. Fixed hierarchies also wreak similar havor within the filing (where does this go?) workflow. Oftentimes, we know what topic to file something under, but we don't know where that topic belongs in the hierarchy. This is perhaps the single biggest reason why filers end up with uncontrollable piles of emails in the Inbox and why pilers never bother to file in the first place.
- From a comment by a developer there, MimiYin, on "Why fixed hierarchies present a workflow bottlneck":
- http://www.communitywiki.org/en/HierarchyConsideredHarmful
- http://www.communitywiki.org/en/AlternativesToHierarchy
We will return you to your regularly scheduled reality in the next update.