Thinking about the geography of knowledge, classification and community-oriented folksonomies (commsonomies) I reviewed today a paper which led me to The European Library. Compare it to the Library of Congress. Still today, libraries are based on classification schemes which are not very usable in a digital age. But there were alternatives to classification also in a non digital age.
I very much like Aby Warburg, an art historian and cultural scientist who invented a library based on the principle of good neighbourhood. I have once visited the Warburg House in Hamburg where a seminar of art historians has taken place. The students have done really great web-based multimedia essays based on the Warburg Electronic Library (WEL) like the virtual reconstruction of a Renaissance studiolo. Iconography is one of the main reasons I started into researching relational concepts for describing the semantics of multimedia. You can not describe any multimedia artefact without its context. Multimedia ontologies are doomed to fail.
