SEP 50: A personal taxonomical structure

A lot of the design of this site has to do with taxonomies, the filing and labelling of the ‘artefacts’ that I produce, be they words, photographs, drawings, audio recordings etc.

Taxonomies don’t have to be perfectly stable in order to be useful, and for now the taxonomies I use are in frequent flux as I explore what fits where. That said, as I write more I come to some firmer conclusions about a taxonomical structure that suits the way I think and would like for this structure to become more solid, though not too rigid, with the passing of time.

Sometimes I find myself going in circles, re-treading the same taxonomical ground. Sometimes this bears new fruit but often it is simply the case that I forgot some conclusion that I had already come to and needn’t have spent that time yet again. This document exists as part of an effort to capture the loose taxonomical ideas that occur to me and slowly form them into that more solid structure.

Ideas + time = meaning. Or something like that.

The structure of my thinking here is rooted in the paradigm of a simple filesystem, where an object exists in a place and is referenced by it’s location. This paradigm is not sacrosanct to me, but it is a metaphor that has always felt both reasonable and sensible to me. That being said, these taxonomies represent a meta structure and so are not in fact bound by this paradigm, even if that underlying structure were exchanged for a database or an object store this meta-structure would remain.

The semi-stable types/taxons of my writing are explore below in the changing tree below:

Memories
Journal
Nonsense

Notes
    proposals
    quotes
    links

I’m also interested in adding a format element, inspired by standard MIME types (see Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies and Media type — Wikipedia).

format would include a primary and sub-type, for example: text/plain, image/jpeg, audio/music, audio/interview

Other metadata elements could perhaps be derived from the work of Dublin Core, see DCMI Metadata Terms.

format: The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource.
type: The nature or genre of the resource.
class:
series:
subject:
audience: A class of agents for whom the resource is intended or useful.
tags:
summary: A short description of the document