The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

6.6. Key Points in Chapter Six

• Categories are equivalence classes: sets or groups of things or abstract entities that we treat the same.

  (See §6.3.2, “Single Properties”)

• The size of the equivalence class is determined by the properties or characteristics we consider.

  (See §6.2, “The What and Why of Categories”)

• We can describe category abstraction in terms of a hierarchy of superordinate, basic, and subordinate category levels.

  (See §6.4.1, “Category Abstraction and Granularity”)

• Any particular collection of resources can be organized using a combination of intrinsic, extrinsic, static and dynamic resource properties.

• Broader or coarse-grained categories increase recall, but lower precision.

  (See §6.4.3, “The Recall / Precision Tradeoff”)

• Classical categories can be defined precisely with just a few necessary and sufficient properties.

  (See §6.4.2, “Basic or Natural Categories”)

• An important implication of necessary and sufficient category definition is that every member of the category is an equally good member or example of the category.

  (See §6.3.3.3, “Necessary and Sufficient Properties”)

• The most conceptually simple and straightforward implementation of categories in technologies for organizing systems adopts the classical view of categories based on necessary and sufficient features.

  (See §6.3.3.3, “Necessary and Sufficient Properties”)

• Any collection of resources with sortable identifiers (alphabetic or numeric) as an associated property can benefit ...