Information patterns: Classification follows context
I was at the Amsterdam Zoo, a place that I go to quite frequently to wander around and feel simple and taken care of amidst a bunch of animals sitting properly organized behind their name tags. No surprises in this place. A zoo breathes a fatherly message: Don't Worry – Man Is In Control.
It's still 2007, and we are in the year of the 400th birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, the man who gave us those animal name tags. His work is now known as the Linnaean Order; which he wrote down for the very first time in his book "Systema Naturae" way back in 1735. Born in Sweden, he lived in the Netherlands when he published his famous book. Since communication was slow and photography didn't exist, biologists needed a system to refer to a certain group of plants or animals, and Linnaeus gave them exactly that.
So we were drawn to the zoo today because there was this very special tour scheduled. I was looking forward to the Linnaean Order Tour by amateur biologist Melle. Melle, me and the other geek attendee (my wife) were nervously waiting at the meeting point for the start of this slightly odd, almost autistic tour about the wonders of Ordering Stuff.
As the three of us were waiting for other people to arrive at the meeting point, I joked – grinning from ear to ear - that the rest of our group of fifty was about to arrive any time soon. It's the kind of humor I particularly enjoy, but I felt sorry the moment I said it. I was hoping it would cheer the guy up. And it did, but just a little bit too much. As a result, we faced waiting for another fifteen minutes with a now frantic guide who said he had never had more than five attendees. When he finally figured that the other forty-eight were not going to show up, which he took as a surprise, we started our tour. Fifteen minutes late, and with just the three of us. I shamefully followed our little group.
The guide, however, appeared to have absolutely no problems with my silly little joke. Instead, he started the tour with a kick start, told us he felt sorry for me that my group had left me alone and ran of to the very first Ordered exhibit on our tour.
This running behavior seemed to be his normal way of moving.
Melle did his tour. We ran from one Ordered place to the other, quickly skipping all of the scarily disorganized parts that we ran into along the way. The only times he was at rest, was at places where the chaos had been forced into control by mister Linnaeus himself. In between those places, I had a hard time keeping up with the guy.
What made Linnaeus so special, he said, was that he made a couple of very clear decisions on how to determine the distinctive facets of animal, plant, or mineral. As an example, he mentioned the fact that anything with breasts is a mammal. I was surprised by this very much simplified version of what I had learned as a kid. Animals laying eggs, sitting on them, or carrying their babies inside their wombs - or not -, penguins, crocodiles, kangaroos and all those exceptions. But it all just came down to this very simple yes/no question: does it have breasts?
Of course it didn't. There's so many things that define a species or that separates one group of animal from another. It rarely boils down to just one yes or no question. Biology, or nature as a whole, doesn't like to stick to simple yes and no questions. In reality, you would need dozens of questions like this to be able to determine a species correctly. And the problem is that with every newborn baby, they change a little teeny bit.
But our guide didn't really care. And he was right: because the rules of the game change continuously, you're going to need a set of very simple basic questions to stick to. And that is what Linnaeus did.
I envy Linnaeus because he had the guts to just start somewhere, take some decisions, simplify a whole lot of things, and still finish off with a complete overview of nature. Simplification really is the hardest part of all. Classifying things is not particularly hard to do, but deciding what the classification rules are, is really hard.
You might recognize this from what you do on your computer. How do you categorize all of your documents? How do you order all of the blogs, the websites, e-mails, files, MP3s, contacts, contracts, and all those other digital bits and pieces that you have laying around on your computer? So you set up a folder structure. And you've put every single file in the right folder, in the right sub folder, and gave it an appropriate name, so you will always be able to find it back again. Are you?
No. Or, maybe you are on your own local machine, but it will definitely go wrong when you start sharing documents with other people in a network. That's because you look at your documents from a slightly different context than others do.
I want a storage mechanism that allows me to just dump in all of my information, not thinking about any kind of classification or folder structure, after which the system goes and figures out the similarities between different objects and the correct classification structure automatically bubbles up. And I want to be able to change that classification structure afterwards, whenever I want, without interfering with the content itself.
But that was just a sidenode.
In the meantime, Melle showed us two statutes. Two laying figures represent mythological Dutch water ghosts. I had seen them many times before, but never really cared about them. Melle took me by surprise by telling me that they once were part of the Linnaean order as well: the Paradoxa. Linnaeus spends half a column in his diagram on creatures that do not fit any of the six standard classes: the unicorn, the phoenix, the dragon, the satyr and apparently, water ghosts too. It took until the sixth edition of his "Systema naturae" (1748) before he would remove these creatures. That struck me. Whether it was an error or not to put them in the first place didn't really matter. What is important, is that Linnaeus set up his order with the idea in mind that it would change over time. In fact, the Linnaean order has changed a lot over time not just skipping fantasy figures, but also moving creatures around, adding categories, changing taxonomies, and it will probably never come to a final state. Due to the nature of what it describes - nature - it simply can't.
Correctly categorizing and classifying requires you to be prepared for change as well. Don't expect to do it correctly first time. Not even the second or the third time. The context of things will always change over time. And when that happens, classification should follow.
After about half an hour, we ended our Linnaean tour. It had been really nice, and the enthusiasm of our guide really made it worth the wait and the cold outside. The funny thing was that it was mostly about how the structure that Linnaeus set up so carefully, had changed so much over time. It felt like structure, but then again, it wasn't. And although Melle, our slightly autistic guide, felt safe and secure knowing Linnaeus had ordered everything for him, we went home feeling a little bit confused. Linnaeus had invented a system that everyone could use and refer to, while still allowing it to change whenever that was needed or new insights came to light.
I want that, too!
