The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

Chapter 6. Describing Relationships and Structures

Robert J. Glushko

Matthew Mayernik

Alberto Pepe

Murray Maloney

6.1. Introduction

We consider a family to be a collection of people affiliated by some connections, such as common ancestors or a common residence. The Simpson family includes a man named Homer and a woman named Marge, the married parents of three sibling children, a boy named Bart and two girls, Lisa and Maggie. This magical family speaks many languages, but most often uses the language of the local television station. In the English-speaking Simpson family, the boy describes his parents as his father and mother and his two siblings as his sisters. In the Spanish speaking Simpson family he refers to his parents as su padre y su madre and his sisters are las hermanas. In the Chinese Simpson family the sisters refer to each other according to their relative ages; Lisa, the elder, as jiě jie and, Maggie, the younger, as mèi mei.309[Bus]

Kinship relationships are ubiquitous and widely studied, and the names and significance of kinship relations like “is parent of” or “is sibling of” are familiar ones, making kinship a good starting point for understanding relationships in organizing systems.310[CogSci] An organizing system can make use of existing relationships among resources, or it can create relationships by applying organizing principles to arrange the resources. Organizing systems for digital resources or digital description resources are the most likely to rely on explicit ...