Title: Submission for the IFLA Satellite Meeting of the Classification
Author: Claudio Gnoli
Last saved by: CG
Company: Università di Pavia. Dip' Matematica

IFLA Satellite Pre-conference of the Classification and Indexing Section
“Looking at the Past and Preparing for the Future”
Florence, 20-21 August 2009

Animals belonging to the emperor:
enabling viewpoint warrant in classification

Claudio Gnoli
University of Pavia. Library Service
via Ferrata 1, 27100 Pavia, Italy
gnoli@aib.it

Abstract: Recent research in knowledge organization has emphasized the need for representing different local perspectives, synthesized in Beghtol's principle of viewpoint warrant. A typical case is the taxonomy of animals: folk or non-Western taxonomies differ from those of academic biology, an extreme example being Borges's paradoxical “Chinese” classification. On the other hand, global services require interoperability between different viewpoints. The Integrative Levels Classification (ILC) project is working at the basic structure of a general, interdisciplinary, freely-faceted system. Among its features is a set of special classes (deictics) that acquire different meanings according to the local context, thus allowing for interoperability between different local extensions of the scheme. Examples of their application to the classification of animals are shown.