Categories and Subcategories
(well, kind of :-)

Once content is created in any of the modules of our website, it is enabled with advanced tools for creating "visibility": search engine optimization, publishing and marketing to the World Wide Web.

Categories is just one of the more traditional ontological tools for organizing information. Basically, our Category and Subcategory system is not a hierarchical or "tree" system. It is more technically termed "colon classification" order. You can select any Category with any Subcategory.

Our dual category system most resembles a traditional classification system know as Colon Classification. It was invented by S. R. Ranganathan, a Brahman from India in 1892. His publication was a book titled Five Laws of Library Science in 1931.

He proposed five basic areas of classification: PERSONALITY : MATTER : ENERGY : SPACE : TIME. He was trying to categorize the entire universe of things.

Notice that like the Dewey Decimal system, the colon system was infinitely expandable even though Dewey's system was severely limited by demanding a heirarchial, linear form like a tree with branches and leaves. Ranganathan system was not limited because he was actually creating an Order for order or what David Weinbeger calls meta order in his book Everything Is Miscellaneous.

In the Colon Classification, each facet could not only expand by addition values, as they were created or discovered. The non-linear, non-hierarchal structure of the Colon Classification allowed a permutation (a mathematical term meaning the number of items could be multiplied facet times facet, times facet, etc.).

That's enough to ponder for the moment. Believe it or not, we do have a smaller universe. In Tendenci software, we have only two Categories facets. But, practically, we also have many other facets through Tagging, User Groups, Committees, etc.

Other Web Resources:

Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags.