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Syracuse University

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Classification schemes

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Library and Information Science

Commercial Websites And The Use Of Classification Schemes: The Case Of Amazon.Com. In Lopez-Huertas, Maria J. Challenges In Knowledge Represantation An Organization For The 21st Century: Intergration Of Knowledge Across Boundaries., Barbara H. Kwasnik Jul 2002

Commercial Websites And The Use Of Classification Schemes: The Case Of Amazon.Com. In Lopez-Huertas, Maria J. Challenges In Knowledge Represantation An Organization For The 21st Century: Intergration Of Knowledge Across Boundaries., Barbara H. Kwasnik

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The structure and use of the classification for books on the Amazon.com website are described and analyzed. The contents of this large website are changing constantly and the access mechanisms have the main purpose of enabling searchers to find books for purchase. This includes finding books the searcher knows about at the start of the research, as well as those that might present themselves in the course of searching and that are related in some way. Underlying the many access paths to books is a classification scheme comprising a rich network of terms in an enumerative and multihierarchical structure.


"Classification Structures In The Changing Environment Of Active Commercial Websites: The Case Of Ebay.Com". In Beeghtol, Clare, Howarth Lynne C., And Williamson, Nancy J. (Eds.) Dynamism And Stability In Knowledge Organization., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Xiaoyong Liu Jul 2000

"Classification Structures In The Changing Environment Of Active Commercial Websites: The Case Of Ebay.Com". In Beeghtol, Clare, Howarth Lynne C., And Williamson, Nancy J. (Eds.) Dynamism And Stability In Knowledge Organization., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Xiaoyong Liu

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper reports on a portion of a larger ongoing project. We address the issues of information organization and retrieval in large, active commercial websites. More specifically, we address the use of classification for providing access to the contents of such sites. We approach this analysis by describing the functionality and structure of the classification scheme of one such representative, large, active, commercial websites: eBay.com, a web-based auction site for millions of users and items. We compare eBay’s classification scheme with the Art & Architecture thesaurus, which is a tool for describing and providing access to material culture.