Taxonomy  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Taxonomy of the Encyclopédie, the so-called Figurative system of human knowledge

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. The word is also used as a count noun: a taxonomy, or taxonomic scheme, is a particular classification. The word finds its roots in the Greek language τάξις, taxis (meaning 'order', 'arrangement') and νόμος, nomos ('law' or 'science'). Originally, taxonomy referred only to the classification of organisms or a particular classification of organisms. In a wider, more general sense, it may refer to a classification of things or concepts, as well as to the principles underlying such a classification. Taxonomy is different from meronomy which is dealing with the classification of parts of a whole.

Many taxonomies have a hierarchical structure, but this is not a requirement. Taxonomy uses taxonomic units, known as taxa (singular taxon).

Applications

Wikipedia categories illustrate a taxonomy and a full taxonomy of Wikipedia categories can be extracted by automatic means. Recently, it has been shown that a manually-constructed taxonomy, such as that of computational lexicons like WordNet, 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 structures. Taxonomies may then include single children 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, taxonomies are considered narrower than ontologies since ontologies apply a larger variety of relation types.

Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy is a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. It is also named containment hierarchy. 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 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'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'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, following the work of the thirteenth-century Majorcan philosopher Ramon Llull on his Ars generalis ultima, a system for procedurally generating concepts by combining a fixed set of ideas, sought to develop an alphabet of human thought. Leibniz intended his characteristica universalis to be an "algebra" capable of expressing all conceptual thought. The concept of creating such a "universal language" was frequently examined in the 17th century, also notably by the English philosopher John Wilkins in his work An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), from which the classification scheme in Roget's Thesaurus ultimately derives.

Use of taxonomies in various disciplines

Taxonomies in 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.

Is-a and has-a relationships

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).

Taxonomy may refer to:

• Taxonomy (general), the practice and science (study) of classification of things or concepts, as well as the principles that underlie such a classification
• Taxonomy (biology), a field of science that encompasses the description, identification, nomenclature, and classification of organisms
  • Biological classification, based on characteristics derived from shared descent from common ancestors
  • Alpha taxonomy, the description and basic classification of new species, subspecies, and other taxa
  • Linnaean taxonomy, Carl von Linne's original classification scheme
  • Evolutionary taxonomy, traditional post-Darwinian hierarchical biological classification
  • Phenetics, a system for ordering species based on mathematical similarities
  • Phylogenetics, based on characteristics derived from shared descent from common ancestors
• Chemical classification, the basal taxonomy of chemical compounds
• Folk taxonomy, the way people describe and organize their natural surroundings

In business and economics

• Corporate taxonomy, the hierarchical classification of entities of interest to an enterprise, organization or administration
• Economic taxonomy, a system of classification for economic activity
  • Global Industry Classification Standard
  • Industry Classification Benchmark
  • International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC)
  • North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)
  • Pavitt's Taxonomy classifies firms by their principal sources of innovation
  • Russian Economic Activities Classification System (OKVED)
  • Standard Industrial Classification
  • United Kingdom Standard Industrial Classification of Economic Activities
  • XBRL Taxonomy, eXtensible Business Reporting Language
• SRK taxonomy in workplace user-interface design

In education

• Bloom's Taxonomy, a standardized categorization of learning objectives in an educational context
• Classification of Instructional Programs
• SOLO Taxonomy, Structure of Observed Learning Outcome, proposed by Biggs and Collis

Safety taxonomy

• Safety taxonomy, a standardized set of terminologies used within the fields of safety and health care
  • CREAM (Cognitive Reliability Error Analysis Method)
  • Human Factors Analysis and Classification System
  • Reason's Swiss Cheese Model

Other

• Military taxonomy, a set of terms that describe various types of military operations and equipment
• Nosology, classification of diseases

See also

• Taxon
• Philosophical language
• Classification (disambiguation)
• Categorization, the process of dividing things into groups
• Taxonomy (disambiguation)
• Categorization
• Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition, a fictional Chinese encyclopedia with an "impossible" taxonomic scheme
• Conflation
• Folksonomy
• Gellish English dictionary, a taxonomy in which the concepts are arranged as a subtype–supertype hierarchy
• Hypernym
• Knowledge representation
• Lexicon
• Ontology (information science)
• Protégé (software)
• Semantic network
• Semantic similarity network
• Structuralism
• Systematics
• Taxonomy for search engines
• Thesaurus (information retrieval)
• Typology (disambiguation)
• Scientific classification (disambiguation)