Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
If you are still creating hierarchies to organize your data (say it ain't so!) this article pretty much closes the case: you shouldn't. "Because hierarchies has been the designated one size fits all solution to all our organizational needs, we break our semantically pure hierarchies by overstretching their bounds. As a result, we end up with messy hierarchies that are unusable and unmaintainable." What, then? Two major alternatives are considered: tags, and faceted classification systems. I tend toward the latter, because as the author notes, "tags are too flexible for their own good." Via elearningpost.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Aug 28, 2025 8:03 p.m.

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