Analysis of the classification structure of Embrapa’s project portfolios: an application of Ranganathan’s faceted classification principles

• Autor(a) principal: Rocha, Laura
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: de Almeida Campos, Maria Luiza
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Em Questão (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/EmQuestao/article/view/105456
• topic: Teoria da Classificação Facetada; Classificação; Categorização; Modelo de domínio; Portfólio da Embrapa; Faceted Classification Theory. Classification. Categorization. Domain model. Embrapa’s portfolio.

This paper discusses the applicability of the principles of Ranganathan faceted classification for activities related to building models of fields of knowledge. We examine the research projects of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, which are organized in portfolios that comprise the corporation’s main fields of operation and that are classified by themes according to strategic goals. We adopt a a qualitative approach and we apply the postulate of categories, proposed by S. R. Ranganathan, to a sample of eleven portfolios (out of 34), which we chose because they linked to the related research projects and because we were able to access and use additional institutional documents related to such projects in our analysis. After categorizing the portfolio into the fundamental categories proposed by Ranganathan, the PMEST categories (Personality, Matter, Energy, Space and Time), we noticted that there was no single guiding principle in the portfolio’s classification basis and that different principles coexisted, although this was not explicit. The analysis showed that there were portfolios related to the Personality, Matter, and Energy categories. We argue that Ranganathan’s faceted classification methods are useful and relevant in a variety of contexts, since they provide a logical basis to the definition of classes and subclasses in a concept system, and that those methods do not depend upon the materiality of the object that is to be categorized, as they deal with what is called the “idea plane”. These methods are deemed essential to the development of knowledge domain models.