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than that. It merges science, practice, bureaucracy, and information systems. NIC coordinates bodies, impairments, charts, reimbursement systems, vocabularies, patients, and health care professionals. Ultimately, it provides a manifesto for nursing as an organized occupation, a basis for a scientific domain, and a tool for organizing work practices. |
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Why It Is Important to Study Classification Systems |
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The sheer density of the collisions of classification schemes in our lives calls for a new kind of science, a new set of metaphors, linking traditional social science and computer and information science. We need a topography of things such as the distribution of ambiguity; the fluid dynamics of how classification systems meet upa plate tectonics rather than a static geology. This new science will draw on the best empirical studies of work-arounds, information use, and mundane tools such as desktop folders and file cabinets (perhaps peering backwards out from the Web and into the practices). It will also use the best of object-oriented programming and other areas of computer science to describe this territory. It will build on years of valuable research on classification in library and information science. |
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We end this introduction with a future scenario that symbolizes this abstract endeavor. Imagine that you are walking through a forest of interarticulated branches. Some are covered with ice or snow, and the sun melts their touching tips to reveal space between. Some are so thickly brambled they seem solid; others are oddly angular in nature, like esplanaded trees. |
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Some of the trees are wild, some have been cultivated. Some are old and gnarled, and some are tiny shoots; some of the old ones are nearly dead, others show green leaves. The forest is still wild, but there are some parks, and some protocols for finding one's way along, at least on the known paths. Helicopters flying overhead can quickly tell you how many types of each tree, even each leaf, there are in the world, but they cannot yet give you a guidebook for bird-watching or forestry management. There is a lot of underbrush and a complex ecology of soil bacteria, flora, and fauna. |
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Now imagine that the forest is a huge information space and each of the trees and bushes are classification systems. Those who make them up and use them are the animals and plants, and the soil is a mix of the Internet, the paper world, and other communication infrastructures. |
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