Compounding Basic Concepts

The hundreds of basic concepts listed in the BCC provide the basis for generating hundreds of thousands of compound classes. Moreover, these classes can take their names from combinations of constituent basic concepts: Attitude toward punctuality (affects) economic output. And the notation then follows: CV4f → EO. Note that the notation is expressive: it tells us that this class describes influences exerted by a particular cultural value on economic output. Note that a lot of information is captured within limited notational space. Notation for theory applied or method applied could be added without the notation becoming unwieldy.

Of course, some sort of notational priority is required for ‘shelving’ within physical collection of documents. The default order of classification would in fact be the reverse of that above: Economic output influenced by attitudes toward punctuality; EO ← CV4f. Yet if it were desired for some reason to shelve such a work with other works on attitudes, the title and notation could be provided as above. In either case searches by each term in the compound notation would find the work. That is, in this classification, the notation is flexible in an important way: X → Y is notationally equivalent to Y ← X but results in different shelf placement. As well, in the case of complex notation where it would not be feasible to place the term desired for shelving first in the notation, it is possible to Bold a later term in a notation and shelve the work under the bolded term.

Occasionally a notational chain may require an ‘anonymous’ term. For example “removed from the forest” could be compounded as “removed something from the forest” In such rare instances, the symbol  can be used for "something."

An application of compound notation can be found in the file DDC to BCC translation-table-web-version-2013

That document illustrates how a wide variety of complex concepts can be understood in terms of basic concepts, and classified using the notation developed in (an earlier version of) the BCC.