Data Banks and Multivariate Statistics in Physical Anthropology

Abstract

In recent decades, the fields of administration and economy, the press and - last but not least - the sciences have been characterized by an “explosion of knowledge”, and, as a consequence, by the problem of managing the rapidly increasing mass of information. It has been estimated that knowledge doubles each five years, and even that the interval of doubling seems to decrease. The main response to this challenge are computerized and structured data collections called data banks. “Data banks are systems of data collections which are organized according to logical and/or formal criteria; they should make it possible to reproduce the data of the total collection arranged according to different aspects …” (REICHERTZ 1975, p. 916). Data banks began to develop in the midst of the sixties (MERTENS 1970), and if we see their present importance for instance in medicine they themselves demonstrate the “explosion of knowledge”. Medical documentation already includes thousands of publications and a dozen or more special periodicals (KOLLER and WAGNER 1975). Not only universities but also important and less important hospitals have their own documentation and computer centers.