Magic numbers : a meta-analysis for enlarging the scope of a universal soil classification system

Categorization of the world around us in discrete classes is an innate capacity of the human mind to organize the information and carry on languages in all past and present cultures. Likewise our cognitive apparatus organize these categories in a hierarchical way. Recently the authors of this monograph demonstrated that the breaking of the continua of biological and pedological entities in order to carry on taxonomies follows the same mathematical rules: an iterative fragmentation according to fractal rules. For this reason both biological and pedological taxonomies have similar topological structures. However these mental constructs divert little bit of the expected fractal values by utilitarian, geographic and cognitive bias. It can recognize two type of cognitive bias, termed the prototypic effect and the constraints of humans to process the information to do not exceed our channel memory capacity. Therefore the fractal fragmentation and our channel memory capacity determine the structures of taxonomies to get efficient information systems. On this working hypotheses the authors shows in this monograph a set of rules that should be follow to could efficient and user friendly information systems. Furthermore, current biological and pedological taxonomies and possibly classification of other disciplines, was carry out by experts conforming to the above-­‐mentioned rules in an intuitive way. In view that there is not a science of the taxonomies the authors offer a set of rules to assist in this task. The steps to carry on hypothetical Universal Soil Taxonomy is used as example.