Taxonomy
For the science of classifying living things, see alpha taxonomy.Taxonomy (from
Greek verb
τασσειν or
tassein = "to classify" and
νομος or
nomos = law, science, cf "economy") was once only the science of classifying living organisms (
alpha taxonomy), but later the word was applied in a wider sense, and may also refer to either a classification of things, or the principles underlying the classification. Almost anything, animate objects, inanimate objects, places, and events, may be classified according to some taxonomic scheme.
Taxonomies are frequently
hierarchical in structure, having parent child relationships. However, taxonomy may also refer to relationship schemes other than hierarchies, such as
network structures.
Other taxonomies may 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 part of several different taxonomies. A taxonomy might also be a simple organization of objects into groups, or even an alphabetical list. In current usage within "
Knowledge Management", taxonomies are seen as slightly less broad than
ontologies.
Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy is a
tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. 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. So for instance in common schemes of
scientific classification of organisms, the root is the
Organism (as this applies to all living things, it is implied rather than stated explicitly). Below this are the
Domain,
Kingdom,
Phylum (plural, phyla),
Class,
Order,
Family,
Genus, and
Species, with various other ranks sometimes inserted.
Some have argued that the human mind naturally organizes its knowledge of the world into such systems. This view is often based on the
epistemology of
Immanuel Kant.
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. The theories of Kant and Durkheim also influenced
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of
anthropological structuralism. Lévi-Strauss wrote two important books on taxonomies,
Totemism and
The Savage Mind.
Such taxonomies as those analyzed by Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss are sometimes called
folk taxonomies to distinguish them from
scientific taxonomies that claim to be disembedded from social relations and thus objective and universal.
A recent
neologism,
folksonomy, should not be confused with Folk Taxonomy (though it is obviously a contraction of the two words). Those who support
scientific taxonomies have recently criticized folksonomies by dubbing them
fauxonomies.
The phrase
enterprise taxonomy is used in business to describe a very limited form of taxonomy used only within one organization.
The field of solving or best-fitting of numerical equations that characterize all measurable quantities of a set of objects is called
cluster analysis; this is a form of taxonomy called
numerical taxonomy or
taximetrics.
*
Systematics*
Scientific classification*
Ontology, but also
Ontology (computer science)*
Folksonomy*
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition, a fictional Chinese encyclopedia with an "impossible" taxonomic scheme.
*
Knowledge representation*
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck*
Wikispecies Main Page*
Taxonomy Browser of National Center for Biotechnology Information
