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Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, 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 A library classification is a system of organization of knowledge by which library resources are arranged and ordered systematically. Library classifications are a notational system that represents the order of topics in the classification and al ...
, or a search engine taxonomy, so that users can more easily find the information they are searching for. Many taxonomies are hierarchies (and thus, have an intrinsic tree structure), 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, 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 and is irregularly compounded from the Greek , ''taxis'' 'order' and , ''nomos'' 'law', connected by the French form ; the regular form would be ''taxinomy'', as used in the Greek reborrowing .


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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 ...
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.


Taxonomy in various disciplines


Natural sciences

Taxonomy in biology encompasses the description, identification, nomenclature, and classification of organisms. Uses of taxonomy include: * Alpha taxonomy, 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 phylogenetic relationship (shared descent), progenitor-descendant relat ...
, 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, system for ordering species based on overall similarity * Phylogenetics, 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 alli ...
* Virus classification, taxonomic system for viruses * Folk taxonomy, description and organization, by individuals or groups, of their own environments * Nosology, classification of diseases * Soil classification, 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, a system of classification for economic activity ** Global Industry Classification Standard, an industry taxonomy developed by MSCI and Standard & Poor's (S&P) ** Industry Classification Benchmark, an industry classification taxonomy launched by Dow Jones and FTSE ** International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC), a United Nations system for classifying economic data ** North American Industry Classification System (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, 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 f ...
, a Standard Industrial Classification by type of economic activity *
Records management taxonomy Records management taxonomy is the representation of data, upon which the classification of unstructured content is based, within an organization. It may manifest itself as metadata in structured database fields or in folder structures represented t ...
, the representation of data, upon which the classification of unstructured content is based, within an organization. *
XBRL Taxonomy XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a freely available and global framework for exchanging business information. XBRL allows the expression of semantic meaning commonly required in business reporting. The language is XML-based and ...
, 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, 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, considered as a tool to improve relevance of search within a vertical domain * ACM Computing Classification System, 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, 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, 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 The Swiss cheese model of accident causation is a model used in risk analysis and risk management, including aviation safety, engineering, healthcare, emergency service organizations, and as the principle behind layered security, as used in c ...
, 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, 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'' 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 * Control ...
of contributor roles. Known as '' CRediT (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 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 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 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 Conditional (if then) may refer to: *Causal conditional, if X then Y, where X is a cause of Y *Conditional probability, the probability of an event A given that another event B has occurred *Conditional proof, in logic: a proof that asserts a co ...
. 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
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. 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. Ling ...
, 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 ...
or human communication, and sense-making in general. Available unde
CC BY 4.0


See also

* * * * Categorization, the process of dividing things into groups * Classification (general theory) * Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition, 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 *
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, a taxonomy in which the concepts are arranged as a subtype–supertype hierarchy * Hypernym * Knowledge representation * Lexicon * Ontology (information science), formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain * Philosophical language * Protégé (software) * Semantic network * Semantic similarity network * Structuralism * Systematics *
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 n ...
, a population of organisms that a taxonomist adjudges to be a unit * Taxonomy for search engines * Thesaurus (information retrieval) * Typology (disambiguation)


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 King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Pr ...
. * 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 ...
. * 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.
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