Knowledge starts with taxonomy

How has the development and dissemination of computer technology changed the way we organize knowledge? I end this post with an example postulated to explain how taxonomy can help communication.

Taxonomy:

• the science of classification

• a classification into ordered categories

In my previous post I shared a video that discussed the change in orientation of researchers from problems of simplicity, to problems of disorganized complexity, to problems of organized complexity. Let me address a related issue, the metaphor for the organization of knowledge.

The organization of fiction in a library is usually by the name of the author. Books are placed on the shelves in alphabetical order of the authors' names. Of course, the alphabetization is a tree structure, with the first branching being on the first letter, the next branching on the second letter, etc. The library transforms the tree structure into a linear order of books on the shelves.

The Dewey Decimal System provides a tree structure for the organization of books in a library. If you think about it, it also provides a way to map a tree structure on to a line. The numbers of the Dewey Decimal System divide the world of books into classes, subclasses, etc. They correspond to the tree structure described in the video. On the other hand, the books are arranged in rows on library shelves -- in a long virtual line.

Most households have relatively few books. The householder can organize his bookshelves as he wishes, and will recall the location of each book. It is relatively easy to put one's finger on any desired volume. It is only when you get to the library, with more books than one can easily place by memory, and in which there are many users and many people shelving books that filing must be systematized.

The library catalog then deals with the problem that our memories don't work according to the library system. We may recall a title or an author, and want to find the book. The library catalog was then a simple system that allowed a few kinds of searches to supplement the order of books on the shelves. One still found oneself going to the shelves if one wanted a book on the Roman empire or Italian cooking, looking within all the books of the category for the one that caught the eye.

I recall some 30 years ago when we got the first personal computer in our office. We were handling about 1000 funding requests per year, funding 50 or 60 of them per year, with a rapidly expanding inventory of current or completed projects. A computer data base allowed us to give proposals numbers that were in the simple sequence of reception, and file them by number. We could search the data base with an entry for each proposal and a field to describe the status to locate project numbers. We could easily list all the proposals from a given proponent, or from a given university, or a given country. We could identify all the funded projects from a given field of science. There were many, many ways that we could search the database which eventually included nearly 10,000 proposals. It seemed like magic at the time.

Of course, now with Google, we can search the vastly more complex knowledge stored on the World Wide Web conducting vastly more complex searches with much less specialized a priori knowledge about the structure of the information base we are searching. Google has developed a complex system to organize information and a complementary system to interpret our requests. (IBM's Watson software is another example of a complex software platform organizing information and responding to questions.) Google too seemed like magic a decade ago, and today seems routine.

The basic point is that computers and the Internet have added computational power to our world and allowed new ways to think about the structuring of knowledge.

An example: Drones

Medea Benjamin

I listened to a talk yesterday by Medea Benjamin on her book, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. It occurred to me that there are many categories that can be used in the description of drones. A drone in an unmanned vehicle. Here are some of the categories:

• Is it areal, surface or underwater, or extraterrestrial? The book is about unmanned aerial vehicles, but we also have unmanned surface vehicles such as those used for bomb disposal. There are underwater vehicles run "by wire" used for deep water exploration in the ocean. The Mars rover is scheduled to land today.
• Benjamin seemed to be especially interested in whether drones were armed or not. While most of the drones used by the military are for surveillance, and some are for disarming IEDs, she focused on those armed as attack weapons.
• What is the purpose of the drone. Is it surveillance, or is it perhaps scientific. There are large numbers of unmanned devices providing information for oceanographers and meteorologists. If for surveillance, is the purpose to identify military threats, or to identify crop pests, or to assess damage resulting from a natural disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane?
• What is the size of the drone. Unmanned aerial vehicles are now available from the size of an insect or small bird, to that of a large model airplane, up to the size of a manned plane. 
• How long can the vehicle operate. There are now underwater vehicles that can operate for months at a time collecting oceanographic information. On the other hand, the small aerial vehicles carried in backpacks by soldiers for battlefield intelligence operation have rather short missions.
• How distant is the human operator (assuming there is one) from the vehicle he operates? The predator drones used in Afghanistan are apparently operated from the United States. On the other hand, some drones are operated by ground personnel within sight of the drone.

What bothered me about Benjamin's talk is that she described the variety of sizes of unmanned aerial vehicles used by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and said that the vast majority of them were used for surveillance and intelligence, but then treated the subject as if all were armed and used as attack weapons. Clearly the vast majority are not armed and are not used as anti-personnel weapons. 

Classification is the basis of knowledge. It is important to define what you are talking about if your concerns are to be appreciated. Benjamin has legitimate concerns about the use of unmanned aerial vehicles as attack weapons to target and kill people in foreign lands. Those concerns would seem not relevant to the vast majority of uses of drones from military surveillance, and even less relevant to the use of drones for scientific purposes, disaster relief, environmental monitoring, or other applications.

In this artist's rendering, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover examines a rock on Mars. Interested New Yorkers will have the opportunity to watch Curiosity's Mars landing in Times Square.