Best of
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(including Best of BUSLIB-L)
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Best of
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Classifying products
If anyone, especially in manufacturing, has ever been involved in classifying products and standardizing descriptors for your company's procurement, materials or storeroom catalogs, please contact me personally.... I am trying to see if there is a standardized list of product names that could be used to uniformly describe products and services. I have gone through the new North American SIC - ICS release, Harmonized Tariff Codes, and Predicast's old descriptors. Pagell and Halperin in their book INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS INFORMATION, p.342-343 also refer to a few international classification systems.... Is anyone else aware of other systems? Based on what I have read, it seems to me that most companies just develop their own customized list? If anyone has personal experience on working on such a project..... Other classification systems to consider: Thomas Register/Thomson Publishing - over 63,000 product headings, Dun and Bradstreet's, United Nations Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC) and Universal Product Codes There are also specialized classification systems for industry groups such as SAE, Maxim, and Construction. A recent article in Information Week (Nov. 29, 1999) "Build the E-Commerce Catalog," addresses the problem the electronic catalog and e-commerce marketplace developers are facing and which librarians have been working on for over a century - how to provide uniformity to thousands of catalogs operating on different formats and using different descriptors. Since millions of dollars might be at stake because consumers can't find the items due to poor classification, industry is starting to seriously focus on this issue. Perhaps the future will yield more higher paying jobs for librarians in this area. Thank you to Trip Wyckoff and Angie Anthony for your suggestions. |
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