From Encyclopedia To Ontology: Toward Dynamic Representation Of The Discipline Of Philosophy / quote 10 of 30
Grab-bag categories
The most common problematic category names were those which seemed to be grab bag categories. A 'grab bag' category here is understood as one which groups together possibly heterogeneous elements which are 'leftovers' from more significant sibling decompositions [...] The frequency of such categories in the taxonomies supplied by experts suggests to us that, rather than simply demonstrating a lack of a label due to ‘laziness’, they seem to be doing some real classificatory work. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear how to replace these categories with something more informative and statistically tractable, even when they are considered on a case-by-case basis. The problem is not crippling for our methods where the grab bag category decomposes into more meaningful sub- categories; where they do not, however, we have excluded them from the current build of the ontology