Re: [RRG] RRG process clarification

[Scott Brim <swb@employees.org>]

Excerpts from Tony Li on Sat, May 03, 2008 11:02:00PM -0700:
> Hi Brian,
> 
> |I realised that this apparent disagreement is because we've
> |been implictly assuming that the only valid taxonomy for solutions
> |is a hierarchy. If you root your hierarchy in the upper layer
> |viewpoint, you get a different tree than if you root it in
> |the routing viewpoint.
> |
> |What we actually need is a facet-based taxonomy. That is what
> |someone (Melinda Shore, to be precise) pointed out to Scott Brim
> |and me when we were developing RFC 3234. If we describe things
> |that way, I suspect we won't disagree at all.
> |
> |[Google will find lots of stuff about facet-based taxonomies,
> |and their inventor S.R. Ranganathan, e.g.
> |http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html ]
> 
> Thank you very much.  I think that's very intriguing.  I encourage other
> folks to check it out.
> 
> Tony

Melinda is the one with the degree in Information Science, and yes she
did mention faceted classification to us.  The idea is that within a
particular attribute you might have a hierarchical taxonomy, but an
object can have multiple independent attributes, and they can be
ordered in priority arbitrarily.  

However, we don't *want* to be able to order attributes arbitrarily
:-).  We can certainly use a faceted classification system to describe
everything, and to index everything, but I will be surprised if we can
use it to pick a solution.

Then again I've finally come to believe that the functions are more
important than what we feed to them.  Instead of discussing naming of
nouns such as "address", let's first talk about interactions between
verbs such as "encapsulate".  Once we have that written down I hope
the attributes of what is fed to the "verbs" will be less important.
I'll try to write more about this soon.

Scott


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