Presentation —— From Mundaneum to Wikipedia: The evolution of Database

By | November 4, 2014

Database is definitely different from the archive or library. One obvious distinction is that database is comparatively more active. Unlike art works or books, data rarely have the value of collection and storage. The best treatment to data and information is active usage. Alexander Library had the ambition to collect all book around the world of that era to achieve a magnificent institution, but to a database, mere collection would only bring it to a redundant and dead system. Beside, because the main “collection” of database is the index of knowledge instead of material stuff, the database could be more accessible than general archives or libraries, which the accessibility would be block by their locations. In a word, the database is intending to push the flow of knowledge, not to monopolize it (like the Alexander Library did in ancient Egypt).
Mundaneum in Belgium is just a typical database institution. The main collection of Mundaneum is not bunches of archive or books, but millions of index cards. In this sense, the main body of Mundaneum is a connection of knowledge’s network, which is its most significant difference from ordinary library and archive institution.
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Think it further, the Mundaneum was actually activating rather than storing the knowledge of human. It enhanced the accessibility of separate knowledge storage to the public and put those dusty archives into active usage globally.
The index card system of Mundaneum is totally amazing. It’s like to a prototype of “hyperlink” in early 20th century. Index cards in Mundaneum are not only independent indexes of separate domains of knowledge, but also the connections and nodes in a broad knowledge network. With this universal network, Mundaneum could be possible to search for any kind of existing knowledge theoretically.
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For this reason, Mundaneum is also reputed as the early model of search engine.
Nowadays, this index form (being the index upon each other) hasn’t become out of date, but evolved to a digitized successor, the Hyperlink. The essence of hyperlink is actually the same as Mundaneum index, which based on a kind of interactive index system. Both the hyperlink and the Mundaneum index put the emphasis on the connection of different knowledge in the data network. These kind of interactive indexes accelerated the efficiency of data searching, activated the usage of knowledge in different domains (blurred the border of knowledge domains in a sense) and increased the public accessibility (their possibility of looking into certain domain) of knowledge.
Here, I’m about to talk the vital similarity between Mundaneum and Wikipedia: both of them are satisfying the request of knowledge through providing the index of knowledge rather than the knowledge itself. Mundaneum’s collection is not focusing on the real books. Its main contribution is that it connected the existing knowledge around the world to an accessible network like a “mechanical, collective brain”. The logic of Wikipedia is similar: Wiki itself is not the author of contents, but the collector, coordinator and distributer. Wikipedia exploits the Internet technology connecting the separate knowledge into an external knowledge system sharing with (as well as contributed by) the public users. In this system, every participating person is becoming a nerve cell of the virtual external brain of human beings and sharing the impulse with others.
Besides the idea of “mechanical, collective brain”, another creative point of Mundaneum is the attempt of paperless ways to transmit the data and knowledge.
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Mundaneum was willing to utilize new media (in that age) such as radio and telegram as the transmitting methods of their knowledge searching result. The index and searching procedure mainly relied on manual works but the way it accepted requests were quite modern in 1920s. Besides the letters, it also received requests issued with telegram. With the help of electronic media, Mundanuem really achieved the global accessibility of knowledge and stepped out a solid pace to the idea of “mechanical, collective brain”. Even now, the Mundaneum Museum is also passionate to latest media: it’s now using Google+ as their online publicity platform!
OK, turn to Wikipedia. Based on the Internet, this online encyclopedia actually realized to involve every participant as both the consumer and contributor of the public knowledge system. Being more advanced than Mundaneum, besides connecting the existing knowledge, Wikipedia is also extending the knowledge database. This function of Wikipedia has transcended a simple “medium”, while interestingly such transcendence was achieved based on the medium function of Wikipedia: to connect every user of the database. This point could be very enlightening to the future of the public knowledge structure.
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Additionally, Wikipedia is also making effort on improving the intelligence of database index and searching. Just being similar to Mundaneum’s effort on paperless transmitting of knowledge, Wikipedia is pushing the trend of “humanless”. In Mundaneum’s era after received the request, the following works were almost relied on manual works according to index cards. In that age, Mundaneum was facing to only about 1,500 requests every year, but think about the load of Wikipedia now… Within the environment of Internet, low efficiency of data retrieving would be a vital defect. So in 2012 Wikipedia pointed out a creative solution: using artificial intelligence to handle the data searching and retrieving works, in a word, to construct a “machine readable database”. Fro instance, if a user asks Wikipedia “which city has a female mayor among the 10 biggest cities around the world?” the AI of Wikipedia could identify the meaning of question then scan the mega database and retrieve the suitable answer for feedback (sounds like what Siri is doing!). After realizing this project, Wikipedia would achieve a new evolution of database index and searching after index card and hyperlink.

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