Classifying Web Sites

[Peter Kumaschow]

Some time ago Eric Lease Morgan posted:
> 
> > http://www.identify.com/
> 
> This service seems to base itself on the concept of a controlled vocabulary and
> structured data. "Gee what a novel idea!"  :-)  In any event, I too will be
> interested in seeing how this idea catches on now that there is some sort of
> financial incentive.

Hi all, first of all of let me say that I'm not a librarian, I am currently contracted as a 
webmaster. The site I maintain is aimed at delivering online education in the form of courses and 
providing easy access to resources that support those courses.

Which brings me to cataloging those resources, something librarians have been doing for some 
time. I initially thought of using the Dewey Decimal system to index a database of online 
resources and then I looked at the Library of Congress Classification system (I believe that most 
University's here in Australia use the LCC). Then I started looking at the big picture. There's 
no way little old me, on my own, is going to be able to maintain a database of internet resources 
without going bonkers. I could create the database and I could even automatically check the 
validty of URL's in the database on a regular basis, but I would have to go through and classify 
all the resources one at a time as they were entered into the database. A time consuming task to 
put it mildly (perhaps I could restrict it to Australian resources). 

The identify search engine provides a neat solution: get the creator of the document to classify 
their own pages. Perhaps we could put the Library of Congress Classification codes in there as 
well. Perhaps we could use meta tags rather than the identify system. We would need the libraries 
to provide the resources to make it easy for authors to classify their creations (and to classify 
materials that are not electronic or have not been classified). And we would need authoring tools 
to facilitate insertion of the appropriate mark up.

It's a big job but we need some method of doing this. And it would be easier if we all did it 
together. I'm not suggesting that we classify all the private and personal home pages or pages 
like the Lesbian Barbie home page (what's the LCC for that?!), maybe only sites that publish 
"quality" information need be classified and the rest can be left to search engines like Yahoo 
etc etc.

Anyway I just need some feedback on what's been running around in my head for the past couple of 
weeks and this seems like a good place to do it. What do you think?

-----------------------------------
Peter Kumaschow                        
Email:  peterk at openweb.net.au
Phone:  02 267 1222 ext 110
Mobile: 0419297948                     
URL:    http://www.wr.com.au/webtext
        http://www.opennet.net.au/