Nathan Shedroff on seven ways to organize data. The Dewey Decimal Classification is noted as organization by ‘number’.
The first step in transforming data into information is to explore its organization. This simple yet crucial process can appear futile, but often you can discover something through it that you had never seen before. It is important to realize that the very organization of things affects the way we interpret and understand their separate pieces. Take any set of things: students in a classroom, financials for a company, information about a city, or animals in a zoo. How would you organize these? Which is best? Richard Saul Wurman suggests five ways to organize everything, but seven seems clearer to me. Literally everything can be organized by alphabet, location, time, continuum, number, or category. Additionally, things often can be randomly organized (in other words, by not organizing them).[A Unified Field Theory of Design]
