Seems like a very long day…because it has been a long day. Started off hours getting the train to Newcastle. No one on it so able to sort out invoices and continue my labour on a controlled vocabulary. Bought Scientific American at the station and note it has an article about the web that I’ll read later…well later I had plenty of time as my train was about 40 minutes late …due to a level crossing failure between Glasgow and Edinburgh, slow running train in front…you know after a while you stop listening. As per usual when it’s a stale expensive sandwich that National Express wants to sell you the announcements are endless. As soon as it’s anything to do with the actual running of the train, silence descends. This is actually good. When the train runs on time it’s a never ending stream of trolley this and coffee that. When it’s late they cut the crap. As well they might. 

The saga of the train meant I missed the first session of the ISKO event at UCL. Sneaked in for session two which I thought was weak; well it was a supplier doing it who just couldn’t help themselves from talking up their product. Shame, because it might have been more interesting and more impressive if the speaker had talked about the conceptual issues. Very tempted to stick hand up and ask whether ’search’ and ‘retrieval’ was going to be controlled by commercial interest? 

Next speaker, Rob Lee was the business. Now one of the examples he used was the semantics of ‘apple’ - the fruit or the software. Well this was interesting because last night at midnight, Michael couldn’t sleep so we were pulling books off the shelf and looking at them. We started with Master and Commander which I’m re-reading. That passed the interest level. Next came McCauley’s History of England on the basis of ‘why have you got *old* books on the shelf?’. Then volume one of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. ‘How can anyone write so much about one thing?’ was asked. And then - don’t ask me how - we got to volume one of the Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of Gardening, which for some reason Michael thought was hilarious.

Opening the book at random, ‘apple’ Malus. Now it struck me when Rob was speaking that there was less ambiguity in Latin classification (was there? I don’t really have enough knowledge - it just seems there was). Was Latin more precise? Has language itself changed because of the various medium - newspapers, television, radio, internet…to become more general and have a smaller vocabulary? There certainly seems to be a greater precision with Latin classification..but then this is the classification of the natural world; and there is a distinction between the products of the natural world and those of the world created by human labour power (not withstanding cross breeding of plants which is a conscious activity).

So, I conclude; maybe I’ll create the vocabulary I’m working on in Latin. In fact maybe the whole internet should be in Latin - and we should encourage the take up of that language as the new universal one. It might help software developers as well.