Taxonomy (general)

For biological taxonomy, see Taxonomy (biology). For sied objects. The progress of reasoning proceeds from
other uses, see Taxonomy (disambiguation).
the general to the more specic.
By contrast, in the context of legal terminology, an openended contextual taxonomy is employeda taxonomy
holding only with respect to a specic 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 specic to the more general.[7]

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classication.

The word is also used as a count noun: a taxonomy,
or taxonomic scheme, is a particular classication. The
word nds its roots in the Greek , taxis (meaning 'order', 'arrangement') and , nomos ('law' or 'science').
Originally taxonomy referred only to the classifying of organisms or a particular classication of organisms.[1] In a
wider, more general sense, it may refer to a classication
of things or concepts, as well as to the principles underlying such a classication. Taxonomy is dierent from
meronomy which is dealing with the classication of parts
of a whole.

2 History

Anthropologists have observed that taxonomies are genMany taxonomies have a hierarchical structure, but this
erally embedded in local cultural and social systems, and
is not a requirement. Taxonomy uses taxonomic units,
serve various social functions. Perhaps the most wellknown as taxa (singular taxon).
known and inuential study of folk taxonomies is mile
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
1 Applications
discussion of their relation to the scientic taxonomy can
be found in Scott Atrans Cognitive Foundations of NatWikipedia categories illustrate a taxonomy[2] and a full
ural History. Folk taxonomies of organisms have been
taxonomy of Wikipedia categories can be extracted by
found in large part to agree with scientic classication,
automatic means.[3] Recently, it has been shown that a
at least for the larger and more obvious species, which
manually-constructed taxonomy, such as that of compumeans that it is not the case that folk taxonomies are based
tational lexicons like WordNet, can be used to improve
purely on utilitarian characteristics.[8]
and restructure the Wikipedia category taxonomy.[4]
In the seventeenth century the German mathematician
In an even wider sense, the term taxonomy could also be
and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, following the work
applied to relationship schemes other than parent-child
of the thirteenth-century Majorcan philosopher Ramon
hierarchies, such as network structures with other types
Llull on his Ars generalis ultima, a system for procedurally
of relationships. Taxonomies may then include single
generating concepts by combining a xed set of ideas,
children with multi-parents, for example, Car might
sought to develop an alphabet of human thought. Leibappear with both parents Vehicle and Steel Mechaniz intended his characteristica universalis to be an alnisms"; to some however, this merely means that 'car'
gebra capable of expressing all conceptual thought. The
[5]
is a part of several dierent taxonomies. A taxonomy
concept of creating such a "universal language" was fremight also be a simple organization of kinds of things into
quently examined in the seventeenth century, also notably
groups, or even an alphabetical list. However, the term
by the English philosopher John Wilkins in his work An
vocabulary is more appropriate for such a list. In curEssay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Lanrent usage within Knowledge Management, taxonomies
guage (1668), from which the classication scheme in
are considered narrower than ontologies since ontologies
Roget's Thesaurus ultimately derives.
apply a larger variety of relation types.[6]
Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy is a tree structure of classications for a given set of objects. It is also
named Containment hierarchy. At the top of this struc- 3 Is-a and has-a relationships
ture is a single classication, the root node, that applies
to all objects. Nodes below this root are more specic Two of the predominant types of relationships in
classications that apply to subsets of the total set of clas- knowledge-representation systems are predication and
1

the universally quantied 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 quantied 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).[9]

See also
Categorization
Conation
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Recognition, a
ctional Chinese encyclopedia with an impossible
taxonomic scheme.
Folksonomy
Gellish English dictionary / Taxonomy, in which the
concepts are arranged as a subtype-supertype hierarchy.
Hypernym
Knowledge representation
Lexicon
Ontology
Protg (software)
Semantic network
Structuralism
Systematics
Thesaurus (information retrieval)
Taxonomy for search engines
Typology (disambiguation)

Notes

[1] Taxonony https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/taxonomy

[2] Zirn, Ccilia, Vivi Nastase and Michael Strube. 2008.
Distinguishing Between Instances and Classes in the
Wikipedia Taxonomy (video lecture). 5th Annual
European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008).
[3] S. Ponzetto and M. Strube. 2007. Deriving a large scale
taxonomy from Wikipedia. Proc. of the 22nd Conference on the Advancement of Articial Intelligence, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, pp. 1440-1445.

REFERENCES

[4] S. Ponzetto, R. Navigli. 2009. Large-Scale Taxonomy

Mapping for Restructuring and Integrating Wikipedia.
Proc. of the 21st International Joint Conference on Articial Intelligence (IJCAI 2009), Pasadena, California, pp.
2083-2088.
[5] Jackson, Joab. Taxonomys not just design, its an
art, Government Computer News (Washington, D.C.).
September 2, 2004.
[6] Suryanto, Hendra and Paul Compton. Learning classication taxonomies from a classication knowledge based
system. University of Karlsruhe; Dening 'Taxonomy',
Straights Knowledge website.
[7] Grossi, Davide, Frank Dignum and John-Jules Charles
Meyer. (2005). Contextual Taxonomies in Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems, pp. 33-51.
[8] Kenneth Boulding, Elias Khalil (2002). Evolution, Order
and Complexity. Routledge. ISBN 9780203013151. p. 9
[9] Ronald J. Brachman; What IS-A is and isn't. An Analysis
of Taxonomic Links in Semantic Networks. IEEE Computer, 16 (10); October 1983.

6 References
Atran, S. (1993) Cognitive Foundations of Natural
History: Towards an Anthropology of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10-ISBN 0521-43871-3; 13-ISBN 978-0-521-43871-3
Carbonell, J. G. and J. Siekmann, eds. (2005).
Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems, Vol.
3487. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. 13-ISBN 978-3540-28060-6
Clausewitz, Carl. (1982). On War (editor, Anatol
Rapoport). New York: Penguin Classics. 10-ISBN
0-140-44427-0; 13-ISBN 978-0-140-44427-8
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. 10-ISBN 0-887-06653-4; 13-ISBN 978-0887-06653-5; OCLC 15856738
*Marcello Sorce Keller, The Problem of Classication 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'; ISBN 978-0-615-24850-9
Hrlin, M.; Sundberg, P. (1998). Taxonomy and
Philosophy of Names. Biology and Philosophy 13
(2): 233244. doi:10.1023/a:1006583910214.
Lamberts, K.; Shanks, D.R. (1997). Knowledge,
Concepts, and Categories. Psychology Press. ISBN
9780863774911.

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