Hispanopedia:Open Encyclopedic Classification

From Hispanopedia

CEA (Clasificación Enciclopédica Abierta, Open Encyclopedic Classification) is an open, modern classification system for knowledge repositories such as encyclopedias, wikis and libraries. It keeps the librarian-familiar idea of a numeric, hierarchical, browsable code, but without the base-10 cap of decimal systems like the UDC or Dewey, so the top level can hold as many classes as a real corpus needs, and any node can be subdivided to unlimited depth.

CEA is released openly for anyone to adopt, translate and extend. Hispanopedia is its reference implementation; the standard itself is project-neutral. The full specification, taxonomy and reference code are published at github.com/hispanopedia/cea under a CC BY 4.0 license (MIT for the code).

Why another classification

General decimal schemes (Dewey, UDC) were built in the 19th century for physical shelves, and they cram everything into ten top classes. For a real encyclopedic corpus that means history, geography and biography all collapse into a single class, which stops discriminating. CEA fixes the two structural problems.

  1. No 10-class cap. Top-level classes are zero-padded two-digit codes (01, 02, ... 17, and beyond if needed). Up to 99 branches per level, unlimited depth. Codes still sort as plain text.
  2. Subject-only codes. A code answers what a thing is, never where or when. Place and period are separate axes, not adjectives baked into the subject code.

Core principles

  • Entity vs. discipline. The thing and the field that studies it are classified apart. A writer goes in Biographies, not in Language and literature; a specific mountain goes in Geographic entities, not in Geography-the-discipline; a book goes in its subject, not blanket "literature."
  • Notation. Zero-padded, dot-separated, two digits per level (15.01.02.16). It reads left to right as a path; truncate to zoom out, extend to zoom in.
  • Multi-class. An article may carry up to three independent lineages (one primary plus two secondary) for genuinely cross-cutting topics.
  • No geography in subject codes. Geographic scope lives in class 15 (Geographic entities) and in the host system's own categories.

The 17 top classes

Using CEA in a wiki

On a MediaWiki site, each CEA node becomes a category named Category:CEA - <name>, nested under its parent code. Articles are tagged with their primary (and optional secondary) CEA categories. Items with no confident assignment go to a CEA sin asignar tracking category, never silently dropped.

Versioning

CEA follows semantic versioning. The taxonomy will grow and be refined; additive refinements bump the minor version, and renumberings that break existing codes bump the major version.

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