Information and knowledge have been classified for centuries. One of the first large organised
catalogues was in the library in Alexandria in Egypt, during the 3rd to 1st centuries BC
(Malafsky, 2008). Callimachus, its first bibliographer, compiled a 120-volume subject catalogue
of all the library’s books, and is considered the founding father of librarians, as he not only
listed the books but also included the author, data on the text and comments on authenticity
to guide users and readers. In ancient Greece, Aristotle (384-322 BC) developed the first large
biological catalogue, grouping animals with similar characteristics into genera and then
distinguishing the species within the genera.
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From Callimachus until the 1730s, classification, arrangement and taxonomy were all
considered synonymous (Lambe, 2007). With time, the field of biology contributed to the
development of taxonomy as an activity in its own right. This was a result of the work of two
biologists with different ideas on how to order and arrange the rapidly growing knowledge base
on species: George Louis Leclerc Compte de Buffon and Carl Linnaeus (ibid). Linnaeus was in
favour of analysis and a controlled nomenclature of living organisms. De Buffon, on the other
hand, advocated for an analysis of their environmental context.
Linnaeus’s argument emerged as the winning one in the end. In his Systema Natura of 1735,
he introduced a simpler way to distinguish species based on their anatomy. In his Critica
Botanica of 1737, he proposed a binomial Latin naming system for different species. He
adopted a hierarchical and nested tree structure to express genealogical relationships, which
contributed to the development and acceptance of evolutionary theories of the late 18th
century and early 19th century. Overall, this new system created a common language that
greatly enhanced coordination and collaboration among botanists and biologists (Lambe,
2007). It simplified classification by imposing rigid rules and standardised approaches and is
still used today in biology. The system has also influenced the management of information and
knowledge in enterprises and organisations, as the next sections show.
But what about de Buffon? While he may have lost the intellectual battle, his criticism of the
system Linnaeus developed provides us with important lessons for the management of
knowledge and information. De Buffon’s argument was that Linnaeus’s system did not capture
the complexity of the biological. In his opinion, organisms could be classified in many different
ways: by their environment, by their adaptations, by their functions, by their similarities in
behaviours, etc.: the anatomy principle was only one way to classify creatures. By suggesting
this multiple classification approach, he inadvertently created the basis for the faceted
classification that is now applied widely in information systems. Lambe (2007) argues that the
system Linnaeus developed highlighted the importance of simplicity and standardisation, which
contributed to its wide acceptance. On the other hand, de Buffon’s greatest legacy relates to
the many possible ways there are to organise the same things, with every arrangement telling
a different story.
The development of cataloguing systems continued to expand to different knowledge domains.
One of the most influential classification systems has been the Dewey Decimal System, which
was introduced in 1876 as the general catalogue system for libraries and which is still
employed today (Hunter, ND; Malafsky and Newman, 2009).
Another famous taxonomy is the Bloom Taxonomy, which was first presented in 1956 by B.S.
Bloom. This taxonomy is considered essential within the education community. It classifies
different objectives that educators set for students (i.e. learning objectives): affective,
psychomotor and cognitive. Within each, the higher level is dependent on a student having
attained the knowledge and skills at lower levels (Bloom, 1956).
The massive expansion of computing during the 1980s helped push information into digital
formats, thus making it possible to distribute it on a much larger scale (Hedden, 2010). The
advent of the internet in the 1990s then contributed to a further explosion of information
dissemination and highlighted the need to develop new tools and skills to organise and retrieve
such information (ibid). In this context, taxonomies have become necessary. But what is a
taxonomy and how can it be defined?
