There are different ways to order text information and organize its
evolution. The one of the simplest examples of what I understand under
?ordering of text information? is book. Text is subsequently placed
and is divided into chapters and subchapters. There is no evolution
(in the sense that text is not changed after it has been created).
Another more complicated example of the ordering is hypertext
(web-pages) where different parts of text are connected through single
words or phrases (hyperlinks). Here we can observe some evolution
organized in some way (web page can be changed by its author(s)).
Other examples are e-mail and web-forums, Google-answer. The
difference between these types of ordering is permission to give
answer, permission to read and so on. My question is following. Does
anybody try to classify (formalize) different types of text
information ordering?  And if it is the case where one can find this
classification?

Hi johnny 

   The question is such that first association I have is PROJECT XANADU® 
               Founded 1960   *   The Original Hypertext Project 

 which attempted to formalize and define much more complex forms of authorship
and reader(s) text interaction then web eventually implemented. 
So, start here for project and ambitions

http://xanadu.com/

and continue here for a critical study
http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/

A different form, still emerging, is wiki

http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

and its variants.
http://www.twiki.org/

Search terms: wiki, Xanadu, non-linear text

Those will give you futher links and terms
such as 
http://users.cs.dal.ca/~jamie/hypertext/note:nonlin.html
http://www.cltr.uq.edu.au/oncall/levy112.html
..
Hedgie

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Clarification of Answer by hedgie-ga on 24 Aug 2005 21:42 PDT

Another way to approach the forms of communication would be to
review and compare CMS systems
http://www.cmswatch.com/

which order specific forms of communications (Forums post, PM,
weblink, newsflash ..)

and separate style, content and presentation..
- fueled by metadata and made possible by complex queries spread
across dozens of templates -- another's might call for something far
more simple, where authors can deliberately choose where content goes
on a site.

---

Clarification of Answer by hedgie-ga on 24 Aug 2005 22:20 PDT

I am sorry: I know you asked for (2$ = 1 link) to Classifications


 One would think that  

A conference on 'Information architecture'
http://www.hebditch.org/archive/category/information_architecture.html

would attempt to  CLASSIFY the topic, would it not?
 
But ALL I can see are LISTS.

such as long list of plug ins (forms of organizing the text):

http://wakka.xiffy.nl/plugin


You may want to look  on the links to taxonomy of taxonomies in
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=540280

There are attempts to create or perceive some order in the chaos
http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tm-vs-thesauri.html

but perhaps the whole field is evolving too quickly?

What about creating a website, where contributors can collaboratively
keep creating and updating taxonomies of all those taxonomies and ..

Starting with this:
http://dmoz.org/Reference/Knowledge_Management/Knowledge_Retrieval/Classification/