Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (Feb 2019)
The Humboldt Portal: Complexity and Interconnectedness
Abstract
The Humboldt Portal has been designed and implemented as part of an ongoing research project to develop an information system on the Internet to share the documents and rare books of Alexander von Humboldt, a 19th century German scientist and explorer, who viewed the natural world holistically and described the harmony of nature among the diversity of the physical world. Even after more than two centuries he is admired for his ability to see the natural world and human nature in the context of a complex network of relationships. The design and implementation of the Humboldt Portal are also oriented to support further research on Humboldt's intellectual perspective. Although all of Humboldt's works can be found on the internet as digitized documents, the complexity and internal inter-connectivity of his vision of nature cannot be adequately represented only by digitized papers or scanned documents in digital libraries. As a consequence a specific portal of the Humboldt's documents was developed, which extends the standards of digital libraries and offers a technical approach for the adequate presentation of highly interconnected data. Due to the continuous scientific and literary research, new insights and requirements for the digital presentation of Humboldt documents are constantly emerging, so that this article only provides a summary of the concepts realized at now. Consequently, the design and implementation of the Humboldt Portal is both: a consequence of a continuing research project and oriented to support more research on Humboldt´s intellectual holistic perspective, which was an anticipation to the System Approach of the last Century.
