S R Ranganathan's ideas have influenced library classification since the inception of his Colon Classification in 1933. His address at Elsinore, "Library Classification Through a Century", was his grand vision of the century of progress in classification from 1876 to 1975, and looked to the future of faceted classification as the means to provide a cohesive system to organize the world's information. Fifty years later, the internet and its achievements, social ecology, and consequences present a far more complicated picture, with the library as he knew it as a very small part and the problems that he confronted now greatly exacerbated. The systematic nature of Ranganathan's canons, principles, postulates, and devices suggest that modern semantic algorithms could guide automatic subject tagging.The vision presented here is one of internet-wide faceted classification and retrieval, implemented as open, distributed facets providing unified faceted searching across all web sites.
S R Ranganathan, Knowledge organization, Faceted classification, Metadata, Tagging, Folksonomies, Ontologies, Subject classification, Hierarchical schema, Automatic classification, Faceted metadata retrieval, Distributed repositories, Semantic algorithms, Semantic graphs, Text analytics, Machine-assisted indexing, Information culture, Vocabulary convergence, Consensus emergence, Crowdsourcing, Wikipedia
