Guide to Classification

Systems Economics Lexicon · Resource Loci & the Guide to Classification

Everything in the first eleven chapters builds the vocabulary and grammar for describing an economic system precisely. This chapter is where that vocabulary actually gets applied — to a real company’s 10-K, or a real person’s job title — and turned into a barcode, using the Multi-Attribute Classification that makes the whole system a genuine Functional Coordinate System rather than a single label.

Classifying a company

Company classification starts with research: reading through whatever revenue breakdown a company provides, which usually comes organized by internally-defined operating segments that don’t necessarily map onto function — some companies segment by product, others by geography or customer. The classifier’s job is to read past that internal framing and separate out what’s actually functionally unique, using citations that document exactly why a given barcode was assigned. A product counts as functionally unique the moment its barcode differs from every other product’s in any field — not just the Enterprise Field. Hospitals classified differently depending on whether their services are covered by private or government insurance are still providing the same medical service; the differentiator just happens to live in the Intermediary Field instead.

Once products are separated out, assigning revenue percentages to each — Product Lining — makes it possible to identify a Summary Barcode: the product line, or combination of product lines, that best represents the company as a whole. When no clean revenue breakdown exists, classifiers use standardized rounding conventions rather than guessing freely, so that assumptions stay consistent and clearly marked as assumptions rather than researched fact.

Classifying a job

Labor classification runs on the same underlying logic, adapted for a single person’s work rather than a company’s revenue. A job can be described either as the full set of work groups an individual’s F resource is used in, or by a single summary task chosen for being both distinguishing and descriptive of most of the work — the second approach needs at minimum a job title, though a job description, a Standardized Occupational Code, or a company description all sharpen the classification considerably. Building a Labor Barcode follows a fixed sequence: identify the work group the F resource is used in and write it into the Job Locus Field (which never terminates on its own, so classification always continues to a second tier); code the resource loci for the object of that Job Locus the same way the Enterprise Barcode’s resource loci get coded; then classify the work group based on the function of the subject resource in the Final Resource Locus — a function that may sit entirely outside the employer’s own system.

What classification is actually for

Individual barcodes are useful on their own, but the real payoff is comparison. Every classified product line and job gets associated with a dictionary position — the Enterprise and Labor Dictionaries that power most of the Locus Model’s applications. The first time a function is identified, it becomes a new dictionary position; every subsequent instance of that same function, wherever it’s found, gets associated with the existing one. That’s what turns a pile of individually-classified companies and jobs into a structure that can actually be queried, compared, and analyzed at scale — the dictionaries are the payoff the first eleven chapters of vocabulary-building were building toward.

See also: Summary Barcode · Product Lining

Part of Resource Loci & the Guide to Classification, course 5 of 7 in the Locus Theory series. For the full term-by-term specification, see the Lexicon.