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Map of All Known Knowledge

2 points

3 hours ago

| 5 comments

All human knowledge

I am a high school student, and I have been thinking about the way knowledge is structured. In schools and universities, we study subjects such as mathematics, physics, biology, and many others. This has led me to wonder: exactly how many subjects exist in total? It is generally understood that all the knowledge humanity currently possesses is finite and organized into distinct areas. I am interested in knowing whether there exists a comprehensive list, table, map, or conceptual framework that captures the entire body of known human knowledge without excluding anything. In other words, I am seeking a complete and exhaustive classification of all subjects, such that no area of knowledge is left unaccounted for. I wish to ensure that I am not unaware of any subject.

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tlb

3 hours ago

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Librarians have systems that can classify every published book. And scientific publishers can classify every paper. Those don't add up to a complete classification of all human knowledge, but it's a substantial fraction of it.

If you skim the high-level book categories at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes, you may conclude this is is beyond a lifetime's work.

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elijahwright

3 hours ago

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Mmhmm. A talented cataloger in a research library understands where the 'fuzz' in these systems is - where the margins intersect - and they have a process for helping systematize those classifications in a way that they can socialize with other librarians across the world. (If nobody has ever cataloged a particular book before... your record is probably going into OCLC WorldCat and other people will borrow the output of your thinking process later... making things more and more definitive.)

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chistev

3 hours ago

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I once read that if you tried to read every Wikipedia article for 12 hours a day, it would take you about 42 years to finish—assuming no new content gets added along the way.

- https://www.rxjourney.net/the-great-ocean-of-truth

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__patchbit__

2 hours ago

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MIT OpenCourseWare has a series of lectures on AI by Marvin Minsky and in one lecture he describes two projects in need of each other but were drifting apart that aimed to keep a beat on knowledge.

You may want to trace the history of librarianship.

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bs55

3 hours ago

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There is no map. Because knowledge and the relations between concepts are not static. Its a dynamical ever growing system.

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elijahwright

3 hours ago

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Start with the library of congress classification system. It'll get you 90 percent of the way there for 10% of the effort.

(Classification systems are very much an information science topic... and they're pretty damn important. Along those same lines - you'll want to think carefully and critically about what is seen as canonical knowledge, and what's "in" those fields, versus what is perceived as "utter crackpot bullshit" that nobody takes seriously. The fields you've mentioned ALL have a significant amount of bleed at the edges - where does math become mathematical physics and then 'really physics' ... it's just not that easy.)

Fanboy comment: just google Eugene Garfield. Have fun!