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Which goes to show that we often conflate identification and classification because it's convenient. It's not always the best decision longer term but it may be

Which goes to show that we often conflate identification and classification because it's convenient. It's not always the best decision longer term but it may be good enough. For your particular task, you could have chosen to identify things of interest and assign them an ID. Separately, you could have made (and revised) a decision on whether a particular thing is a lab or a research institute and/or some other kind of entity. In my experience, organisations are some of the most difficult things to model. The ways in which they can merge, split, be part of one another, be the same and not the same in different jurisdictions or according to different sets of rules are basically infinite. So when you say "The really key thing with this is to identify what your database/Id is solving and what it is not" I totally agree. But I would add that identification and classification solve overlapping problems that are often deceptively similar but not quite the same.

IanCal 3y ago
> For your particular task, you could have chosen to identify things of interest and assign them an ID. Separately, you could have made (and revised) a decision on whether a particular thing is a lab or a research institute and/or some other kind of entity. I get the point but we couldn't. The very concept of what one thing is, is a fuzzy decision in itself. There's also not a single hierarchy that makes sense for different uses so you can't just group and then classify - legal ownership, financing and operational control can all be distinct structures. Then how people actually work can be another. Even then, fundamentally what we needed was to get away from trying to model the world then work out how to use it. Because then you have one Id that maps one way for one user and another for another user and now their work is incompatible - but in a subtle and hidden way. Edit - this doesn't take away from your point, classification is a distinct problem.

IanCal 3y ago

> For your particular task, you could have chosen to identify things of interest and assign them an ID. Separately, you could have made (and revised) a decision on whether a particular thing is a lab or a research institute and/or some other kind of entity. I get the point but we couldn't. The very concept of what one thing is, is a fuzzy decision in itself. There's also not a single hierarchy that makes sense for different uses so you can't just group and then classify - legal ownership, financing and operational control can all be distinct structures. Then how people actually work can be another. Even then, fundamentally what we needed was to get away from trying to model the world then work out how to use it. Because then you have one Id that maps one way for one user and another for another user and now their work is incompatible - but in a subtle and hidden way. Edit - this doesn't take away from your point, classification is a distinct problem.