8. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM (ONTOLOGY)

As in most human endeavors, there is a need to simplify life by dividing it into categories or classes. In science the result usually is called an “ontology”. We have created a draft one for COMPASS. It starts with the work of Dawkins (1989), who referred to items in the external environment (outside an organism’s genome) as “mimemes” (for “memories”) or, for short, “memes”. But these were only for abstract concepts like “love”, not for “concrete” items like buildings or trees or various groups of people.

As a result there was a need to develop a new ontology for what has been called the “exo-genome”. And, because it is difficult to distinguish public administration (PA) topics from those that are not, the same ontology is utilized to cover both PA and external-to-PA elements.

As mentioned previously, “genes” in the PAGP are known as “topics” or, more formally, “cistrons” (actually an older name for “genes”). Five main categories in the PA Genome thus have been created using the “tron” suffix. These and respective selected subsets are shown and illustrated in Table 1. The full set can be found in the main wiki at:

http://pagenome-compass.pbworks.com/PA+Genome+Ontology

See TP Page9 for a start of that page.

Contributors to COMPASS are free to create their own ontology but also are strongly encouraged to use the one provided. Whichever path is taken, it is very useful for later search purposes to assign the closest relevant categories to each variable in the source case at hand. This usually is done by assigning one category to each non-trivial word in the short description of the particular variable (see, for instance, the “related categories” section of TP Page7 and TP  Page8).

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