Submitted for your consideration

Posted by Hugh
Aug 18, 2012 at 03:08 PM

Although Steve’s taxonomy demands more thought, I am pretty happy with it as it is.

For me the y-axis/North-South/primary-purpose distinction is the key one. It is here that for newbies there appears to be the most confusion. It would be very useful to be able to indicate to them where on that spectrum particular applications lie.

The x-axis is likely to be complicated by the understandable desire of developers to create applications that identify, organise and access information as much as possible every-which-way - topical placement, tags, linking, wikis, hierarchical folders, “artificial intelligence”, maps, diagrams, concordance-based search, to name the few I can immediately think of - and therefore will probably be more arbitrary. The complexities involved in adding and understanding an extra dimension could outweigh the advantages.