[Sigia-l] Re: first principals (bias in cataloging & classification)

[Listera]

"Peter VanDijck" wrote:

> Especially in the domain of classifying animals and plants, there is a lot
> of bias and fuzzyness. Historically, things were classified mostly by
> appearance. Then analyzing the genetic lines of animals became possible,
> and lo and behold, the existing classification schemes turned out to be
> incompatible with a genetic scheme.

I don't have a specific recommendation, but I urge anyone with an interest
in seeing how fundamental principals of IA were applied in distant history
to read the account of how the notion of 'species' were invented by John Ray
in late 1600s and later refined by Linnaeus.

(Previously, the naturalists literally classified bestiary and herbals
alphabetically and how they were used by humans. So the order of a given
specimen would be different depending in which language it was recorded in!)

Linnaeus solved the classical problem of 'namespace' (as today's programmers
and XML advocates would recognize immediately) by adopting binomial
nomenclature (genus + species). He generated 5,900 binomial labels for all
the known species in a *single* year (!), thereby avoiding the possibility
that other naturalists could corrupt the namespace by duplication. (His
nomenclature wasn't perfect by any means, but think about the enormity of
that task next time you are asked to come up with half a dozen labels for a
website :-)

These kinds of leaps of understanding happen not too often in history and
it's fascinating to read how such clever folk discovered different ways of
looking at established classifications and rewrote the book, so to speak.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba