The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

3.6. Key Points in Chapter Three

• We can consider a resource to be one of many members of a very broad category, as the unique instance of a category with only one member, or anywhere in between.

  (See §3.1.1, “What Is a Resource?”)

• The size of the category—the number of resources that are treated as equivalent—is determined by the properties or characteristics we consider when we examine the resource.

  (See §3.1.1, “What Is a Resource?”)

• Organizing systems for physical information resources emphasize description resources or surrogates like bibliographic records that describe the information content rather than their physical properties.

  (See §3.1.1.2, “Bibliographic Resources, Information Components, and “Smart Things” as Resources”)

• An identifier is a special kind of name assigned in a controlled manner and governed by rules that define possible values and naming conventions. The design of a scheme for persistent identifiers must consider both the required time frame and the number of resources to be identified.

  (See §3.1.2, “Identity, Identifiers, and Names”)

• Active resources create effects or value on their own, sometimes when they initiate interactions with passive resources. Active resources can be people, other living resources, computational agents, active information sources, web-based services, self-driving cars, robots, appliances, machines or otherwise ordinary objects like light bulbs, umbrellas, and shoes that have been made “smarter.”

  (See §3.2.3.2, “Active or Operant Resources” ...