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.

Abstract

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