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Taxonomy is the practice and science of
categorization Categorization is the ability and activity of recognizing shared features or similarities between the elements of the experience of the world (such as Object (philosophy), objects, events, or ideas), organizing and classifying experience by a ...
or
classification Classification is a process related to categorization, the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Classification is the grouping of related facts into classes. It may also refer to: Business, organizat ...
. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a
hierarchical classification Hierarchical classification is a system of grouping things according to a hierarchy. In the field of machine learning, hierarchical classification is sometimes referred to as instance space decomposition, which splits a complete multi-class pro ...
, in which things are organized into groups or types. Among other things, a taxonomy can be used to organize and index knowledge (stored as documents, articles, videos, etc.), such as in the form of a library classification system, or a search engine taxonomy, so that users can more easily find the information they are searching for. Many taxonomies are
hierarchies A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an important ...
(and thus, have an intrinsic
tree structure A tree structure, tree diagram, or tree model is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a structure in a graphical form. It is named a "tree structure" because the classic representation resembles a tree, although the chart is gener ...
), but not all are. Originally, taxonomy referred only to the categorisation of organisms or a particular categorisation of organisms. In a wider, more general sense, it may refer to a categorisation of things or concepts, as well as to the principles underlying such a categorisation. Taxonomy organizes taxonomic units known as "taxa" (singular "taxon")." Taxonomy is different from
meronomy A meronomy or partonomy is a type of hierarchy that deals with part–whole relationships, in contrast to a taxonomy whose categorisation is based on discrete sets. Accordingly, the unit of meronomical classification is meron, while the unit of ...
, which deals with the categorisation of parts of a whole.


Etymology

The word was coined in 1813 by the Swiss botanist
A. P. de Candolle Augustin Pyramus (or Pyrame) de Candolle (, , ; 4 February 17789 September 1841) was a Swiss botanist. René Louiche Desfontaines launched de Candolle's botanical career by recommending him at a herbarium. Within a couple of years de Candolle ...
and is irregularly compounded from the
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, ''taxis'' 'order' and , ''nomos'' 'law', connected by the French form ; the regular form would be ''taxinomy'', as used in the Greek
reborrowing Reborrowing is the process where a word travels from one language to another and then back to the originating language in a different form or with a different meaning. This path is indicated by A → B → A, where A is the originating language, an ...
.


Applications

Wikipedia categories form a taxonomy, which can be extracted by automatic means. , it has been shown that a manually-constructed taxonomy, such as that of computational lexicons like
WordNet WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short definition ...
, can be used to improve and restructure the Wikipedia category taxonomy. In a broader sense, taxonomy also applies to relationship schemes other than parent-child hierarchies, such as
network structure Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...
s. Taxonomies may then include a single child with multi-parents, for example, "Car" might appear with both parents "Vehicle" and "Steel Mechanisms"; to some however, this merely means that 'car' is a part of several different taxonomies. A taxonomy might also simply be organization of kinds of things into groups, or an alphabetical list; here, however, the term vocabulary is more appropriate. In current usage within
knowledge management Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organisational objectives by making ...
, taxonomies are considered narrower than
ontologies In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains ...
since ontologies apply a larger variety of relation types. Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy is a
tree structure A tree structure, tree diagram, or tree model is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a structure in a graphical form. It is named a "tree structure" because the classic representation resembles a tree, although the chart is gener ...
of classifications for a given set of objects. It is also named
containment hierarchy A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an important ...
. At the top of this structure is a single classification, the root node, that applies to all objects. Nodes below this root are more specific classifications that apply to subsets of the total set of classified objects. The progress of reasoning proceeds from the general to the more specific. By contrast, in the context of legal terminology, an open-ended contextual taxonomy is employed—a taxonomy holding only with respect to a specific context. In scenarios taken from the legal domain, a formal account of the open-texture of legal terms is modeled, which suggests varying notions of the "core" and "penumbra" of the meanings of a concept. The progress of reasoning proceeds from the specific to the more general.


History

Anthropologists An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and v ...
have observed that taxonomies are generally embedded in local cultural and social systems, and serve various social functions. Perhaps the most well-known and influential study of folk taxonomies is
Émile Durkheim David Émile Durkheim ( or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, al ...
's ''The Elementary Forms of Religious Life''. A more recent treatment of folk taxonomies (including the results of several decades of empirical research) and the discussion of their relation to the scientific taxonomy can be found in
Scott Atran Scott Atran (born February 6, 1952) is an American-French cultural anthropologist who is Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, Research Professor at the University of Michigan, ...
's ''Cognitive Foundations of Natural History.'' Folk taxonomies of organisms have been found in large part to agree with scientific classification, at least for the larger and more obvious species, which means that it is not the case that folk taxonomies are based purely on utilitarian characteristics. In the seventeenth century the German mathematician and philosopher
Gottfried Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathem ...
, following the work of the thirteenth-century Majorcan philosopher
Ramon Llull Ramon Llull (; c. 1232 – c. 1315/16) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, missionary, and Christian apologist from the Kingdom of Majorca. He invented a philosophical system known as the ''Art'', conceived as a type of universal logic to pro ...
on his ''
Ars generalis ultima Ramon Llull (; c. 1232 – c. 1315/16) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, missionary, and Christian apologist from the Kingdom of Majorca. He invented a philosophical system known as the ''Art'', conceived as a type of universal logic to pro ...
'', a system for procedurally generating concepts by combining a fixed set of ideas, sought to develop an
alphabet of human thought The alphabet of human thought ( la, alphabetum cogitationum humanarum) is a concept originally proposed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that provides a universal way to represent and analyze ideas and relationships by breaking down their component piec ...
. Leibniz intended his ''
characteristica universalis The Latin term ''characteristica universalis'', commonly interpreted as ''universal characteristic'', or ''universal character'' in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientif ...
'' to be an "algebra" capable of expressing all conceptual thought. The concept of creating such a "
universal language Universal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's people. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all humans. It may be the idea of ...
" was frequently examined in the 17th century, also notably by the English philosopher
John Wilkins John Wilkins, (14 February 1614 – 19 November 1672) was an Anglican clergyman, natural philosopher, and author, and was one of the founders of the Royal Society. He was Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death. Wilkins is one of the fe ...
in his work '' An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language'' (1668), from which the classification scheme in Roget's
Thesaurus A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: Synonym diction ...
ultimately derives.


Taxonomy in various disciplines


Natural sciences

Taxonomy in biology encompasses the description, identification, nomenclature, and classification of organisms. Uses of taxonomy include: *
Alpha taxonomy In biology, taxonomy () is the science, scientific study of naming, defining (Circumscription (taxonomy), circumscribing) and classifying groups of biological organisms based on shared characteristics. Organisms are grouped into taxon, taxa (s ...
, the description and basic classification of new species, subspecies, and other taxa **
Linnaean taxonomy Linnaean taxonomy can mean either of two related concepts: # The particular form of biological classification (taxonomy) set up by Carl Linnaeus, as set forth in his ''Systema Naturae'' (1735) and subsequent works. In the taxonomy of Linnaeus t ...
, the original classification scheme of Carl Linnaeus ** rank-based scientific classification as opposed to clade-based classification *
Evolutionary taxonomy Evolutionary taxonomy, evolutionary systematics or Darwinian classification is a branch of biological classification that seeks to classify organisms using a combination of Phylogenetics, phylogenetic relationship (shared descent), progenitor-de ...
, traditional post-Darwinian hierarchical biological classification *
Numerical taxonomy Numerical taxonomy is a classification system in biological systematics which deals with the grouping by numerical methods of taxonomic units based on their character states. It aims to create a taxonomy using numeric algorithms like cluster ...
, various taxonomic methods employing numeric algorithms *
Phenetics In biology, phenetics ( el, phainein – to appear) , also known as taximetrics, is an attempt to classify organisms based on overall similarity, usually in morphology or other observable traits, regardless of their phylogeny or evolutionary rel ...
, system for ordering species based on overall similarity *
Phylogenetics In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek language, Greek wikt:φυλή, φυλή/wikt:φῦλον, φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary his ...
, biological taxonomy based on putative ancestral descent of organisms *
Plant taxonomy Plant taxonomy is the science that finds, identifies, describes, classifies, and names plants. It is one of the main branches of taxonomy (the science that finds, describes, classifies, and names living things). Plant taxonomy is closely allied ...
*
Virus classification Virus classification is the process of naming viruses and placing them into a taxonomic system similar to the classification systems used for cellular organisms. Viruses are classified by phenotypic characteristics, such as morphology, nucleic ac ...
, taxonomic system for viruses *
Folk taxonomy A folk taxonomy is a vernacular naming system, as distinct from scientific taxonomy. Folk biological classification is the way people traditionally describe and organize their natural surroundings/the world around them, typically making generou ...
, description and organization, by individuals or groups, of their own environments *
Nosology Nosology () is the branch of medical science that deals with the classification of diseases. Fully classifying a medical condition requires knowing its cause (and that there is only one cause), the effects it has on the body, the symptoms that ...
, classification of diseases *
Soil classification Soil classification deals with the systematic categorization of soils based on distinguishing characteristics as well as criteria that dictate choices in use. Overview Soil classification is a dynamic subject, from the structure of the system, ...
, systematic categorization of soils


Business and economics

Uses of taxonomy in business and economics include: *
Corporate taxonomy Corporate taxonomy is the hierarchical classification of entities of interest of an enterprise, organization or administration, used to classify documents, digital assets and other information. Taxonomies can cover virtually any type of physical or ...
, the hierarchical classification of entities of interest to an enterprise, organization or administration *
Economic taxonomy An economic taxonomy is a system of classification of economic activity, including products, companies and industries. Some economists believe that the study of economic policy demands the use of a taxonomic/classificatory approach. Industry taxon ...
, a system of classification for economic activity **
Global Industry Classification Standard The Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) is an industry taxonomy developed in 1999 by MSCI and Standard & Poor's (S&P) for use by the global financial community. The GICS structure consists of 11 sectors, 24 industry groups, 69 industrie ...
, an industry taxonomy developed by MSCI and Standard & Poor's (S&P) **
Industry Classification Benchmark The Industry Classification Benchmark (ICB) is an industry classification taxonomy launched by Dow Jones and FTSE in 2005 and now used by FTSE International and STOXX. It is used to segregate markets into sectors within the macroeconomy. The I ...
, an industry classification taxonomy launched by Dow Jones and FTSE **
International Standard Industrial Classification The International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) is a United Nations industry classification system. Wide use has been made of ISIC in classifying data according to kind of economic activity in the fields of emp ...
(ISIC), a United Nations system for classifying economic data **
North American Industry Classification System The North American Industry Classification System or NAICS () is a classification of business establishments by type of economic activity (process of production). It is used by government and business in Canada, Mexico, and the United States of A ...
(NAICS), used in Canada, Mexico, and the United States of America **
Pavitt's Taxonomy Pavitt's Taxonomy categorizes mostly large industrial firms along trajectories of technological change according to sources of technology, requirements of the users, and appropriability regime (Pavitt 1984). The taxonomy aims to classify innovation ...
, classification of firms by their principal sources of innovation **
Standard Industrial Classification The Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) was a system for classifying industries by a four-digit code as a method of standardizing industry classification for statistical purposes across agencies. Established in the United States in 1937, it ...
, a system for classifying industries by a four-digit code **
United Kingdom Standard Industrial Classification of Economic Activities United may refer to: Places * United, Pennsylvania, an unincorporated community * United, West Virginia, an unincorporated community Arts and entertainment Films * ''United'' (2003 film), a Norwegian film * ''United'' (2011 film), a BBC Two fi ...
, a Standard Industrial Classification by type of economic activity * Records management taxonomy, the representation of data, upon which the classification of unstructured content is based, within an organization. * XBRL Taxonomy, eXtensible Business Reporting Language * SRK taxonomy, in workplace user-interface design


Computing


Software engineering

Vegas et al. make a compelling case to advance the knowledge in the field of software engineering through the use of taxonomies. Similarly, Ore et al. provide a systematic methodology to approach taxonomy building in software engineering related topics. Several taxonomies have been proposed in software testing research to classify techniques, tools, concepts and artifacts. The following are some example taxonomies: # A taxonomy of model-based testing techniques # A taxonomy of static-code analysis tools Engström et al. suggest and evaluate the use of a taxonomy to bridge the communication between researchers and practitioners engaged in the area of software testing. They have also developed a web-based tool to facilitate and encourage the use of the taxonomy. The tool and its source code are available for public use.


Other uses of taxonomy in computing

*
Flynn's taxonomy Flynn's taxonomy is a classification of computer architectures, proposed by Michael J. Flynn in 1966 and extended in 1972. The classification system has stuck, and it has been used as a tool in design of modern processors and their functionalities. ...
, a classification for instruction-level parallelism methods *
Folksonomy Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags ...
, classification based on user's tags *
Taxonomy for search engines Taxonomy for search engines refers to classification methods that improve relevance in vertical search. Taxonomies of entities are tree structures whose nodes are labelled with entities likely to occur in a web search query. Searches use these tree ...
, considered as a tool to improve relevance of search within a vertical domain *
ACM Computing Classification System The ACM Computing Classification System (CCS) is a subject classification system for computing devised by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The system is comparable to the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) in scope, aims, and s ...
, a subject classification system for computing devised by the Association for Computing Machinery


Education and academia

Uses of taxonomy in education include: * Bloom's taxonomy, a standardized categorization of learning objectives in an educational context *
Classification of Instructional Programs The Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) is a taxonomy of academic disciplines at institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada. The CIP was originally developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) o ...
, a taxonomy of academic disciplines at institutions of higher education in the United States *
Mathematics Subject Classification The Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) is an alphanumerical classification scheme collaboratively produced by staff of, and based on the coverage of, the two major mathematical reviewing databases, Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH. ...
, an alphanumerical classification scheme based on the coverage of Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH *
SOLO taxonomy The structure of observed learning outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical clas ...
, Structure of Observed Learning Outcome, proposed by Biggs and Collis Tax


Safety

Uses of taxonomy in safety include: * Safety taxonomy, a standardized set of terminologies used within the fields of safety and health care **
Human Factors Analysis and Classification System The Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) identifies the human causes of an accident and offers tools for analysis as a way to plan preventive training.
, a system to identify the human causes of an accident ** Swiss cheese model, a model used in risk analysis and risk management propounded by Dante Orlandella and James T. Reason **A taxonomy of rail incidents in Confidential Incident Reporting & Analysis System (CIRAS)


Other taxonomies

*
Military taxonomy Military taxonomy encompasses the domains of weapons, equipment, organizations, strategies, and tactics.CycorpStructured information The use of taxonomies in the military extends beyond its value as an indexing tool or record-keeping template. Bli ...
, a set of terms that describe various types of military operations and equipment *
Moys Classification Scheme The Moys Classification Scheme is a system of library classification for legal materials. It was designed by Betty Moys and first published in 1968. It is used primarily in law libraries in many common law jurisdictions such as Canada, Australia, Ne ...
, a subject classification for law devised by Elizabeth Moys


Research publishing

Citing inadequacies with current practices in listing authors of papers in medical research journals, Drummond Rennie and co-authors called in a 1997 article in ''JAMA'', the ''
Journal of the American Medical Association ''The Journal of the American Medical Association'' (''JAMA'') is a peer-reviewed medical journal published 48 times a year by the American Medical Association. It publishes original research, reviews, and editorials covering all aspects of bio ...
'' for
''a radical conceptual and systematic change, to reflect the realities of multiple authorship and to buttress accountability. We propose dropping the outmoded notion of author in favor of the more useful and realistic one of contributor.''
Since 2012, several major academic and scientific publishing bodies have mounted ''Project CRediT'' to develop a
controlled vocabulary Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controlling ...
of contributor roles. Known as ''
CRediT Credit (from Latin verb ''credit'', meaning "one believes") is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt) ...
(Contributor Roles Taxonomy)'', this is an example of a flat, non-hierarchical taxonomy; however, it does include an optional, broad classification of the degree of contribution: ''lead'', ''equal'' or ''supporting''.
Amy Brand Amy Brand (born October 20, 1962) is an American academic. Brand is the current Director and Publisher of the MIT Press, a position she assumed in July 2015. Previously, Brand served as the assistant provost of faculty appointments and informatio ...
and co-authors summarise their intended outcome as:
Identifying specific contributions to published research will lead to appropriate credit, fewer author disputes, and fewer disincentives to collaboration and the sharing of data and code.
As of mid-2018, this taxonomy apparently restricts its scope to ''research outputs'', specifically journal articles; however, it does rather unusually "hope to … support identification of peer reviewers". (As such, it has not yet defined terms for such roles as editor or author of a chapter in a ''book'' of research results.) Version 1, established by the first Working Group in the (northern) autumn of 2014, identifies 14 specific contributor roles using the following defined terms: *Conceptualization *Methodology *Software *Validation *Formal Analysis *Investigation *Resources *Data curation *Writing – Original Draft *Writing – Review & Editing *Visualization *Supervision *Project Administration *Funding acquisition Reception has been mixed, with several major publishers and journals planning to have implemented CRediT by the end of 2018, whilst almost as many aren't persuaded of the need or value of using it. For example,
The
National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
has created a ''TACS (Transparency in Author Contributions in Science)'' webpage to list the journals that commit to setting authorship standards, defining responsibilities for corresponding authors, requiring ORCID iDs, and adopting the CRediT taxonomy.
The same webpage has a table listing 21 journals (or families of journals), of which: * 5 have, or by end 2018 will have, implemented CRediT, * 6 require an author contribution statement and suggest using CRediT, * 8 don't use CRediT, of which 3 give reasons for not doing so, and * 2 are uninformative. The taxonomy is an open standard conforming to the OpenStand principles, and is published under a
Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
licence.


Taxonomy for the web

Websites with a well designed taxonomy or hierarchy are easily understood by users, due to the possibility of users developing a mental model of the site structure. Guidelines for writing taxonomy for the web include: * Mutually exclusive categories can be beneficial. If categories appear several places, it's called cross-listing or polyhierarchical. The hierarchy will lose its value if cross-listing appears too often. Cross-listing often appears when working with ambiguous categories that fits more than one place. * Having a balance between breadth and depth in the taxonomy is beneficial. Too many options (breadth), will overload the users by giving them too many choices. At the same time having a too narrow structure, with more than two or three levels to click-through, will make users frustrated and might give up.


Is-a and has-a relationships, and hyponymy

Two of the predominant types of relationships in knowledge-representation systems are predication and the universally quantified conditional. Predication relationships express the notion that an individual entity is an example of a certain type (for example, ''John is a bachelor''), while universally quantified conditionals express the notion that a type is a subtype of another type (for example, "''A dog is a mammal"'', which means the same as "''All dogs are mammals"'').
Ronald J. Brachman Ronald Jay "Ron" Brachman (born 1949) is the director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist of Yahoo! and head of Yahoo! Labs. Prior to that, he was the Associate Head of Yahoo! Labs and H ...

What IS-A is and isn't. An Analysis of Taxonomic Links in Semantic Networks
IEEE Computer, 16 (10); October 1983.
The "has-a" relationship is quite different: an elephant ''has'' a trunk; a trunk is a part, not a subtype of elephant. The study of part-whole relationships is
mereology In logic, philosophy and related fields, mereology ( (root: , ''mere-'', 'part') and the suffix ''-logy'', 'study, discussion, science') is the study of parts and the wholes they form. Whereas set theory is founded on the membership relation bet ...
. Taxonomies are often represented as ''is-a'' hierarchies where each level is more specific than the level above it (in mathematical language is "a subset of" the level above). For example, a basic biology taxonomy would have concepts such as ''mammal'', which is a subset of ''animal'', and ''dogs'' and ''cats'', which are subsets of ''mammal''. This kind of taxonomy is called an is-a model because the specific objects are considered as instances of a concept. For example, ''Fido'' is-an instance of the concept ''dog'' and ''Fluffy'' is-a ''cat''.
In
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, is-a relations are called hyponymy. When one word describes a category, but another describe some subset of that category, the larger term is called a ''hypernym'' with respect to the smaller, and the smaller is called a "hyponym" with respect to the larger. Such a hyponym, in turn, may have further subcategories for which it is a hypernym. In the simple biology example, ''dog'' is a hypernym with respect to its subcategory ''collie'', which in turn is a hypernym with respect to ''Fido'' which is one of its hyponyms. Typically, however, ''hypernym'' is used to refer to subcategories rather than single individuals.


Research

Researchers reported that large populations consistently develop highly similar category systems. This may be relevant to lexical aspects of large communication networks and cultures such as folksonomies and
language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
or human communication, and sense-making in general. Available unde
CC BY 4.0


See also

* * * *
Categorization Categorization is the ability and activity of recognizing shared features or similarities between the elements of the experience of the world (such as Object (philosophy), objects, events, or ideas), organizing and classifying experience by a ...
, the process of dividing things into groups *
Classification (general theory) The term classification can apply to one or all of: * the process of classifying (distinguishing and distributing kinds of "things" into different groups) * a resulting set of classes (also called "a classification system") * the assignment of el ...
*
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition ''Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge'' ( es, link=no, Emporio celestial de conocimientos benévolos) is a fictitious taxonomy of animals described by the writer Jorge Luis Borges in his 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" ( ...
, a fictional Chinese encyclopedia with an "impossible" taxonomic scheme *
Conflation Conflation is the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, opinions, etc., into one, often in error. Conflation is often misunderstood. It originally meant to fuse or blend, but has since come to mean the same as equate, treati ...
*
Faceted classification A faceted classification is a classification scheme used in organizing knowledge into a systematic order. A faceted classification uses semantic categories, either general or subject-specific, that are combined to create the full classification ent ...
*
Folksonomy Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags ...
*
Gellish English dictionary The Gellish English Dictionary-Taxonomy is an example of an open-source “smart” electronic dictionary, in which concepts are arranged in a subtype-supertype hierarchy, thus forming a taxonomy. The dictionary-taxonomy is machine readable. It i ...
, a taxonomy in which the concepts are arranged as a subtype–supertype hierarchy *
Hypernym In linguistics, semantics, general semantics, and ontologies, hyponymy () is a semantic relation between a hyponym denoting a subtype and a hypernym or hyperonym (sometimes called umbrella term or blanket term) denoting a supertype. In other wor ...
*
Knowledge representation Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...
*
Lexicon A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Koine Greek language, Greek word (), neuter of () ...
*
Ontology (information science) In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains ...
, formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain *
Philosophical language A philosophical language is any constructed language that is constructed from first principles. It is considered a type of engineered language. Philosophical languages were popular in Early Modern times, partly motivated by the goal of revising nor ...
*
Protégé (software) Protégé is a free, open source ontology editor and a knowledge management system. The Protégé meta-tool was first built by Mark Musen in 1987 and has since been developed by a team at Stanford University. The software is the most popular and w ...
*
Semantic network A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, ...
*
Semantic similarity network Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
*
Structuralism In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader ...
*
Systematics Biological systematics is the study of the diversification of living forms, both past and present, and the relationships among living things through time. Relationships are visualized as evolutionary trees (synonyms: cladograms, phylogenetic tre ...
*
Taxon In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; plural taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular nam ...
, a population of organisms that a taxonomist adjudges to be a unit *
Taxonomy for search engines Taxonomy for search engines refers to classification methods that improve relevance in vertical search. Taxonomies of entities are tree structures whose nodes are labelled with entities likely to occur in a web search query. Searches use these tree ...
*
Thesaurus (information retrieval) In the context of information retrieval, a thesaurus (plural: "thesauri") is a form of controlled vocabulary that seeks to dictate semantic manifestations of metadata in the indexing of content objects. A thesaurus serves to minimise semantic ambig ...
*
Typology (disambiguation) Typology is the study of types or the systematic classification of the types of something according to their common characteristics. Typology is the act of finding, counting and classification facts with the help of eyes, other senses and logic. Ty ...


Notes


References

* Atran, S. (1993) ''Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science.'' Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press A university press is an academic publishing hou ...
. * Carbonell, J. G. and J. Siekmann, eds. (2005)
''Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems,'' Vol. 3487.
Berlin:
Springer-Verlag Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing. Originally founded in 1842 in ...
. * Malone, Joseph L. (1988)
''The Science of Linguistics in the Art of Translation: Some Tools from Linguistics for the Analysis and Practice of Translation.''
Albany, New York:
State University of New York Press The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by c ...
.
OCLC 15856738
* *Marcello Sorce Keller, "The Problem of Classification in Folksong Research: a Short History", ''Folklore'', XCV(1984), no. 1, 100-104. * Chester D Rowe and Stephen M Davis, 'The Excellence Engine Tool Kit'; * *


External links

* * *
Taxonomy 101: The Basics and Getting Started with Taxonomies
' {{Authority control Scientific nomenclature Hierarchy Ontology