Greetings all,

this is my first message to the group, but I lacked time
to self-introduce me yet. Briefly, I am a 33 years old 
librarian working at Pavia University, Italy: so my 
background and interests are mainly related to 
classification theory by Ranganathan, CRG and all 
those boring old library people 

""" [Giovanni Sacco]  Now, I admit that I might have 
reinvented faceted classification, but I would like to keep 
my pragmatic point of view (and simplify quite a bit). """

Actually, your description of what you call dynamic
taxonomies do have much in common with the analytico-
synthetic process of faceted classification.

BTW, _faceted classification_ has been usually translated
by Italian librarians into "classificazione a faccette":
however, as pointed out by my friend Eugenio Gatto 
(a deep scholar of Ranganathan's work), _faccetta_
does not mean in Italian the same as _facet_ in English;
he would prefer to translate _FC_ by "classificazione
multidimensionale"... and interestingly, Giovanni uses just 
these words in his description of dynamic taxonomy!

Anyway, I find two points especially stimulating in
Giovanni's point of view.

(1) His focus on using a-posteriori combination of 
subjects to both describe documents and search them. 
In LIS terms, this is called _post-coordinate indexing_;
it seems especially fit for faceted classifications or
faceted subject indexes (the two differs, roughly,
in using or not a notation), and the digital environment.
I recently wrote a paper on a very similar subject
<http://www-dimat.unipv.it/~gnoli/coord.htm>
(it may be interesting to Giovanni; unfortutalely it's in 
Italian, but I can clarify special points here if needed);
there, among other things, it's described how 
postcoordinate indexing is used in the digital version 
of the Mathematics Subject Classification, which IMHO 
works very well, although MSC unfortunately is not a
faceted schema. I believe it is quite the same situation
as in ACM computer science classification, mentioned
as an example by Giovanni.

(2) Although dynamic taxonomy approach uses ad-hoc 
categories basically analogous to facets, facets to be 
used are not necessarily the canonical ones of object, 
part, matter, process, agent, space, time, etc. So one 
could wonder whether it is needed to map any used 
facet to the above standard categories (which were 
established after long studies and experience by 
Rangathan and the CRG as the most useful ones).

The additional original element in the description
of dynamic taxonomies seems to be the reuse of
a posteriori information about connection between 
subjects, on the basis of their actual occurrence in 
documents (which would be called the _literary warrant_
by LIS people): I would be curious to know which kind 
of use is then provided for this information.

Thanks to all for your attention.

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