Introduction

"The history of classification is a history of man's attempts to recognize, understand and organize concepts and records of knowledge. ...As long as modern science is characterized by ever-increasing specialization and is split into innumerable disciplines continually generating new sub-disciplines, the improvement and development of Faceted Classification must be at the heart of our further efforts toward the better cognition, explanation and organization of knowledge" (Xiao 1994).

"Classification systems that more closely match human knowledge and the user's mental models put more control into the hands of the user" (Louie, Maddox, and Washington 2003).