placesthingspeople

Placesthingspeople is a coined term used in information science and digital humanities to describe three broad categories that are commonly used to organize knowledge: places, things, and people. The phrase functions as a mnemonic rather than a formal standard, appearing in educational material and informal discussions to illustrate how data can be categorized and retrieved across different entity types. It is sometimes written as placesthingspeople or rendered as Places, Things, and People.

In practice, placesthingspeople guides the design of databases, ontologies, and search interfaces by mapping data to three core classes. Places cover geographic locations and spaces; Things cover objects, artifacts, or conceptual entities; People cover individuals and social roles. In knowledge graphs and semantic schemas, these categories often correspond to basic classes such as Place, Thing (or Entity), and Person, with linked properties like name, location, date, and identifiers. The framework is compatible with standard modeling approaches that emphasize entity types and their relations.

Because it is informal, the term is not standardized, and many implementations use more granular or additional categories such as Organization, Event, or Concept. The concept remains useful for teaching, quick prototyping, and cross-disciplinary communication about data interoperability, since it foregrounds the common-sense idea that data can be grouped by where, what, and who. It is related to broader discussions of taxonomy, ontology design, and knowledge representation in information systems.