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A notation, says H. E. Bliss, is ‘a system of marks or symbols in some order, denoting terms or members of a series or system of things’. For the purposes of classification, he continues, a notation ‘is requisite to maintain the systematic order in schedules and on shelves, and to locate them in this order’. The notation is thus correlative, complementary, and subsidiary to the classified order itself. The classified order reflects, well or ill, the real order of tilings; notation preserves and mechanizes this classified order. ‘The classification is the main thing, and the notation, however real its service, does not make the classification, though it may mar it’.

A previous study of notation in classification appeared in this journal in 1952 (ref. 1). I there considered what functions notational symbols actually serve in existing systems of classification, and how the structure of the symbols is related to the functions served. I showed that a classification symbol serves three purposes: (a) to represent a term, (b) to locate it among a mass of other terms, and (c) to indicate relations between the terms symbolized. The first two purposes can be readily fulfilled by using any symbols which can be arranged in a unique linear order. It is the need to indicate relations between terms which has created the complex structure of modern classification symbols.

When the augmentative and alternative communication (ACC) model (Lloyd et al., 1990) was proposed, these components of symbols were not considered, nor were they contemplated when superordinate (Lloyd and Fuller, 1986) and subordinate levels (Fuller et al., 1992) of AAC symbol taxonomy were developed. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the ACC model and propose a new symbol classification system called multidimensional quaternary symbol continuum (MQSC)

The field of AAC is evolving at a rapid rate in terms of its clinical, social, research and theoretical underpinnings. Advances in assessment and intervention methods, technology and social issues are all responsible to some degree for the significant changes that have occurred in the field of AAC over the last 30 years. For example, the number of aided symbol collections has increased almost exponentially over the past couple of decades. The proliferation of such a large variety of symbol collections represents a wide range of design attributes, physical attributes and linguistic characteristics for aided symbols and design attributes and linguistic characteristics for unaided symbols.

Therefore, it may be time to revisit the AAC model and more specifically, one of its transmission processes referred to as the means to represent.

The focus of this theoretical paper then, is on the current classification of symbols, issues with respect to the current classification of symbols in terms of ambiguity of terminology and the evolution of symbols, and a proposal for a new means of classifying the means to represent.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon10.1108/JET-04-2021-0024

The principles of the author's theory of classification are summarized, and the necessity of expressing true relations between concepts in a classification is stressed. The logical faults in existing classifications (especially U.D.C., Bliss, and Colon) are discussed in comparison. The psychological and logical bases of the author's theory are considered in greater detail than before, especially as regards the derivation of the operators. In this connexion a change has been found necessary in the writing of the reaction operator, being A/—B, for B acts on A (instead of A—/B). Four new operators are introduced, being ‘dimensional’ (time and space, &c.), ‘comparison’, ‘association’, and ‘concurrence’, the last three on a basis of learning theory and work on conditioned responses in psychology. Examples are given of their uses. Operators represent logical relations, and their meanings, in everyday language, are discussed. The selection of a preferred order for the construction of a classification is shown to be possible on a logical basis, being the fully deductive order. The problem of notation is then dealt with in detail. It is shown that a fully elastic ‘deductive’ notation, allowing extrapolation and interpolation in all ways, not achieved in other classifications, is possible, but still does not meet the requirements of inductive classification. A notation is developed which provides arbitrary symbols for isolates, connected by operator symbols, and this is shown to be the only solution which meets all the requirements for expressing an inductive classification according to the author's theory.

In preceding papers in this series, it has been shown that the symbols used in classificatory notation are of several kinds. They serve different functions—some represent scheduled classificatory terms, some are ‘signposts’ specifying the nature of the symbols which follow them, others are simply ‘fences’ separating consecutive term symbols, and yet others are relational particles. Again, symbols serving the same function may have different structures—they may be flexions or isolates, so that the notation for scheduled terms may be ‘hierarchical’ or ‘ordinal’.

The function of a subject index is above all practical: it is a working tool designed to help the user to find his way about the documented information in a given subject field. Any system of indexing and classification must be judged by its practical value to the user, not by its conformity to a set of abstract principles. Despite this, it is only on the basis of inductively derived principles that a system can be constructed at all.

IT has now been definitely arranged that the Conference of the Library Association will take place in the week beginning September 6th. Leeds has an old‐time reputation for hospitality and civic pride, and there is every reason to believe that from the library point of view also the Conference will be one of the most interesting and productive of recent years. It will appeal strongly to the whole of this generation of librarians from the fact that the President‐elect is Dr. Henry Guppy, the veteran Librarian of the John Rylands Library, who in the old days, when he was editor of The Library Association Record, gave perhaps greater stimulus than any man of his day to the young library worker to educate and equip himself for finer library service. It may be that under its present able editor the Library Association Record is approaching the quality which it possessed under Dr. Guppy. We doubt whether it has surpassed or can surpass that quality. It is hoped, we understand, that the main subjects for discussion will be those which arose out of Principal Grant Robertson's Inaugural Address at Birmingham last year. Libraries and citizenship is a subject with many phases and possibilities. We hope that the Council will give us the opportunity to explore many of its avenues.

Three adjustment modes are alternatives for mixed-model assembly lines (MMALs) to improve their production plans according to constantly changing customer requirements. The purpose of this paper is to deal with the decision-making problem between these modes by proposing a novel multi-classification method. This method recommends appropriate adjustment modes for the assembly lines faced with different customer orders through machine learning from historical data.

The decision-making method uses the classification model composed of an input layer, two intermediate layers and an output layer. The input layer describes the assembly line in a knowledge-intensive manner by presenting the impact degrees of production parameters on line performances. The first intermediate layer provides the support vector data description (SVDD) of each adjustment mode through historical data training. The second intermediate layer employs the Dempster–Shafer (D–S) theory to combine the posterior classification possibilities generated from different SVDDs. The output layer gives the adjustment mode with the maximum posterior possibility as the classification result according to Bayesian decision theory.

The proposed method achieves higher classification accuracies than the support vector machine methods and the traditional SVDD method in the numerical test consisting of data sets from the machine-learning repository and the case study of a diesel engine assembly line.

This research recommends appropriate adjustment modes for MMALs in response to customer demand changes. According to the suggested adjustment mode, the managers can improve the line performance more effectively by using the well-designed optimization methods for a specific scope.

The adjustment mode decision belongs to the multi-classification problem featured with limited historical data. Although traditional SVDD methods can solve these problems by providing the posterior possibility of each classification result, they might have poor classification accuracies owing to the conflicts and uncertainties of these possibilities. This paper develops a novel classification model that integrates the SVDD method with the D–S theory. By handling the conflicts and uncertainties appropriately, this model achieves higher classification accuracies than traditional methods.

The study of information is central to the science of Cybernetics. The communication and processing of information takes place, in general, by means of signals, which represent or describe (in other words symbolize) the entities to which the information relates. The present paper examines one of the foundation problems of Cybernetics: the principles of representing entities and the relations between them by systems of symbols. It treats these principles as extensions and generalizations of the fundamental concepts of measurement.

In Part II of this series of papers (this Journal, vol. 12, no. 2,1956, pp. 73–87), I urged that to ‘obtain a quantitative understanding of the relationships between brevity of symbol and style of notation, it is necessary to construct a series of model notations in which only one feature is varied at a time’. I then compared the lengths of two styles of ordinal notation—‘enumerative’ notation such as that of Bliss or the U.D.C., which does not use distinctive main‐class symbols, and what I called ‘faceted’ notation such as that of Ranganathan, which does use such symbols. (I would now prefer to call the latter ‘labelled’ notation.)