The Classifier Category File Organization system originated out of my attempt to organize the notes, ideas, artifacts, tasks, projects, and information, in both the physical and digital formats.

Background

Taxonomy has been around since librarians have been working on systems like the Dewey Decimal and UDC for books and literature. The curators over at r/DataCurator have been attempting to tackle the same for the digital artifacts.

This system takes all these sources into account and provides a modular layer, that allows one to mix-and-match to arrive at a particular setup that should enable:

• workflow integration
• search and retrieval
• transfer and backup
• sharing and collaboration

System

The CCFOS expands on the categories provided by various curation systems (example: datacurator-filetree @ GitHub, Johnny Decimal, Universal Decimal Classification ) by introducing a Classfier before the Categories.

/data-[<root>]/<classfier>/<category>

Instead of attempting to arrive at yet another curation system that is exhaustive to cover all aspects of artifacts one might collect, the CCFOS works with the understanding that the selection of Categories are different with in different contexts of Classifiers.

data-<root>

This is an optional prefix to the <classfier>. A particular CCFOS setup may have one or more of these data-<root> folders, but generally the primary (data-local-all) is used for all daily operations. This is the folder that the primary user of the system has full (read+write) access.

The other secondary data-<root> folders contain sliced/subset of <classfier>/<category> that is used for transfer, backup, sharing/collaboration purposes.

<classfier>

The top level classifier in CCFOS are: personal (self), private (relations), and public (all). These are further classified as:

    └───data-[<root>]
        ├───personal
        │   ├───doe.jane
        │   └───doe.john
        ├───private
        │   ├───family.doe
        │   ├───jane-doe-contract1.com
        │   ├───john-doe-work1.com
        │   └───john-doe-work2.com
        └───public
            ├───blog.john-doe.com
            └───general

Note that the above shows the overall set of classifier folders in a household and a particular user's data-local-all would have only the subset. For example, the John Doe in the above illustration, would have the following in his user space:

<john.doe-user>
    └───data-local-all 
        ├───personal
        │   ├───doe.john
        ├───private
        │   ├───family.doe
        │   ├───john-doe-work1.com
        │   └───john-doe-work2.com
        └───public
            ├───blog.john-doe.com
            └───general

And similarly, Jane Doe would be having:

<jane.doe-user>
├───personal
│   ├───doe.jane
├───private
│   ├───family.doe
│   └───jane-doe-contract1.com
└───public
    ├───[blog.john-doe.com]
    └───general

<category>

This is the unopinionated part of the CCFOS, where any of the other curation systems, aforementioned or otherwise, can be plugged in. As the broad-stroke classification has already been done, the type/method/process of categories can be optimized.

personal/<last.first-name> Categories

Ideas, journals, files, and other personal artifacts would go into this. Systems like GTD can govern the way one setups up the category folders here.

These folders can be further periodically copied out to a /data-dropbox-personal/personal/<last.first-name> folder for backup to Dropbox as an example.

private/<group-type.name> Categories

If it is a professional group, there may be company setup categories that needs to be used. Or a Johnny Decimal system may be used. It as such may be periodically synced with /data-onedrive-private-group-type.name/private/<group-type.name> folder for sync to OneDrive as an example.

In case of a private/family group, one can follow the simple pictures, videos and/or media categories and have it shared within the family.

Example

Here is a CCFOS setup done for a household of a couple(names changed), that allows them to manage their artifacts, and the couple to share the family media with the rest of their family.

Induvidual Setup

└───data-local-all-raj
    ├───personal
    │   └───kumar.raj
    │       ├───documents
    │       └───notes
    ├───private
    │   └───family.kumar
    │       ├───pictures
    │       └───videos
    └───public
        └───general
            ├───movies
            └───music

The /data-local-all-raj/personal/kumar.raj is synced to Dropbox accout of Raj Kumar.

└───data-local-all-rani
    ├───personal
    │   └───kumar.rani
    │       ├───documents
    │       └───workspace
    ├───private
    │   └───family.kumar
    │       ├───pictures
    │       └───videos
    └───public
        └───general
            ├───movies
            └───music

The /data-local-all-raj/personal/kumar.rani is synced to Dropbox accout of Rani Kumar.

Shared Private Folder

The individual's copy of the /data-local-all/private/family.kumar is kept in sync (using rsync) with a local copy of Raj's OneDrive folder:

└───data-onedrive-personal-kumar.raj
    └───private
        └───family.kumar
            ├───pictures
            └───videos

This folder is shared via OneDrive to rest of their family (who live elsewhere outside the household).

Public Folder

└───data-googledrive-public-kumar.rani
    └───public
        └───general
            ├───movies
            └───music

Rani's Google Drive subscription is used to store the family's digital media for consumption. Though, at the time of the setup the household did not have a NAS, this can be easily set to sync at that location, once available.