i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

September 1, 2010

Throughout the day-to-day, we—individuals, organizations, and services—organize information. We organize things, information about things, and information in a variety of formats, digital and otherwise. When we analyze these different contexts—we can be easily distracted by the specific information types, organizing principles, technology, functions or features, and individuals or companies involved in any particular example. We can get lost trying to define “information” in ways that fit these different contexts because it is inherently abstract, and most of its hundreds of definitions treat it as an idea that swirls around equally hard to define terms like “data”, “knowledge,” and “communication.” These challenges in taking a broader look that emphasizes what these contexts have in common rather than how they differ are the motivation for the concept of the Organizing System.

Our concept of Organizing System has to confront head on the duality of information as thing versus information as an intangible concept. When an Organizing System deals with information as physical thing, it follows different principles and must conform to different constraints than when it deals with information as intangible thing. And many organizing systems—like that in the modern library with online catalogs and physical collections—accommodate both notions of information at the same time. The implications for arranging, finding, using and reusing things in any organizing system directly reflect the mix of these two perspectives about information.

Explicitly or by default, an Organizing System makes many interdependent decisions about the identities of entities and information components, their names and descriptions, the classes, relations, structures and collections in which they participate, and the people or technologies who create, transform, combine, compare and use them. Namely: What is being organized? Why it is being organized? How much is it being organized? When is it being organized? By whom (or by what computational processes) it is being organized?