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Thursday, July 19, 2018
Photo source: Wikimedia Commons, Fortepan
Photo license: CC BY-SA 3.0
What is a representation? Here is my definition:
A representation is something that stands for the actual thing
In an earlier post, I said that establishing knowledge is one of the central goals of intellectual activity. If establishing knowledge is a central goal, another goal is to create true physical representations of reality. This includes all of our models, descriptions, equations and illustrations. For example, the equation E=MC^2 is a representation of a real world phenomenon. Another example, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is believed to be a representation of Lisa del Giocondo. In this regard, all of our written and spoken knowledge is a representation.
In 2015, I created the website Econfactbook.org to be a representation the world economy. On the website, there is a page for 193 countries and I believe this layout could be expanded to states and cities. To create the website, I retrieved statistics from many different sources and organized the statistics into a consistent format. The goal of this website is to make a clear representation of the world economy.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
