About

This blog is Charlie Mayor’s account of the readings from his PhD in the Department for Information Science at City University (started in October 2008).

My research project is focused on classification in biology: the classification of ideas, objects and data in biology. I’m interested in the schema biologists have developed to structure knowledge in biology, and to aid information retrieval.

I think the boom in bioinformatics and the trend towards e-science-driven methods begs interesting questions like “Can a machine be a biologist?” or “Should biological classifications be constructed be consensus?”

For more information about the research project, see the original research proposal (PDF, 92kb).

For more information about the Department of Information Science at City University, see the departmental web pages