Placing Joseph Banks in the North Pacific

The South Pacific was a fulcrum of Joseph Banks's maritime world and global networks. The North Pacific was a distance and intangible fringe. This article is concerned with how Banks should be ‘placed’ in the North Pacific. It tracks how Banks's activities have been delineated in terms of languages and categories of global and local, and centre and margin, and then considers the historical and geographical specifics apposite to his connection to the North Pacific. In this setting, ideas of place (as location and assignment) and capital (as a circulatory and everyday practice of exchange and opportunism) come into view and question the distinction between science and commerce in Banks historiography. The article considers a diverse group of non-Indigenous figures – explorers, traders, cartographers, scientists, collectors – operating in the North Pacific in the 1780s and 1790s whose initiatives and missives passed across Banks's desk, and assesses their place in Banks's archive by drawing on Peter Sloterdijk's ideas about the interiorising and exteriorising logic of capital.PostprintPeer reviewe

Ontology mapping: A way out of the medical tower of babel

Integration of different information sources has been a problem that has been challenging (or perhaps better: plaguing) Computer Science throughout the decades. As soon as we had two computers, we wanted to exchange information between them, and as soon as we had two databases, we wanted to link them together. Fortunately, Computer Science has made much progress on different levels: Physical interoperability between systems has been all but solved: with the advent of hardware standards such as Ethernet, and with protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP, we can nowadays walk into somebody house or office, and successfully plug our computer into the network, giving instant world-wide physical connectivity. Physical connectivity is not sufficient. We must also agree on the syntactic form of the messages we will exchange. Again, much progress has been made in recent years, with open standards such HTML and XML. Of course, even syntactic interoperability is not enough. We need not onl