Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a practice and science concerned with

classification or categorization. Typically, there are two
parts to it: the development of an underlying scheme of
classes (a taxonomy) and the allocation of things to the
classes (classification).

Originally, taxonomy referred only to the classification

of organisms on the basis of shared characteristics. Today
it also has a more general sense. It may refer to the
classification of things or concepts, as well as to the
principles underlying such work. Thus a taxonomy can
be used to organize species, documents, videos or Generalized scheme of taxonomy
anything else.

A taxonomy organizes taxonomic units known as "taxa" (singular "taxon")." Many are hierarchies.

One function of a taxonomy is to help users more easily find what they are searching for. This may be
effected in ways that include a library classification system and a search engine taxonomy.

Etymology
The word was coined in 1813 by the Swiss botanist A. P. de Candolle and is irregularly compounded from
the Greek τάξις, taxis 'order' and νόμος, nomos 'law', connected by the French form -o-; the regular form
would be taxinomy, as used in the Greek reborrowing ταξινομία.[1][2]

Applications
Wikipedia categories form a taxonomy,[3] which can be extracted by automatic means.[4] As of 2009, 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.[5]

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.[6] 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.[7]
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.[8]

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.[9]

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.

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, the original classification scheme of Carl Linnaeus
rank-based scientific classification as opposed to clade-based classification
Evolutionary taxonomy, traditional post-Darwinian hierarchical biological classification
 Numerical taxonomy, 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
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, 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, 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, a Standard
Industrial Classification by type of economic activity
EU taxonomy for sustainable activities, a classification system established to clarify which
investments are environmentally sustainable, in the context of the European Green Deal.
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.[10] make a compelling case to advance the knowledge in the field of software engineering
through the use of taxonomies. Similarly, Ore et al.[11] 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:
 1. A taxonomy of model-based testing techniques[12]
2. A taxonomy of static-code analysis tools[13]
Engström et al.[14] 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[15] to facilitate and encourage the use of the taxonomy. The tool and its source code are
available for public use.[16]

Other uses of taxonomy in computing

Flynn's taxonomy, a classification for instruction-level parallelism methods
Folksonomy, 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, 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, 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, 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.[17]: 152

In 2012, several major academic and scientific publishing bodies mounted Project CRediT to develop a
controlled vocabulary of contributor roles.[18] 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.[17]: 151

CRediT comprises 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
The taxonomy is an open standard conformiing to the OpenStand principles,[19] and is published under a
Creative Commons licence.[18]

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.[20]
Guidelines for writing taxonomy for the web include:

Mutually exclusive categories can be beneficial. If categories appear in several places, it is

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.[20]
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.[20]

In communications theory
Frederick Suppe[21] distinguished two senses of classification: a broad meaning, which he called
"conceptual classification" and a narrow meaning, which he called "systematic classification".

About conceptual classification Suppe wrote:[21]: 292 "Classification is intrinsic to the use of language,
hence to most if not all communication. Whenever we use nominative phrases we are classifying the
designated subject as being importantly similar to other entities bearing the same designation; that is, we
classify them together. Similarly the use of predicative phrases classifies actions or properties as being of
a particular kind. We call this conceptual classification, since it refers to the classification involved in
conceptualizing our experiences and surroundings"

About systematic classification Suppe wrote:[21]: 292 "A second, narrower sense of classification is the
systematic classification involved in the design and utilization of taxonomic schemes such as the
biological classification of animals and plants by genus and species.

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").[22]

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.[23]

In linguistics, 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 or human
communication, and sense-making in general.[24][25]

Theoretical approaches Comparison of categories of small and

large populations

Knowledge organization
Hull (1998) suggested "The fundamental elements of any classification are its theoretical commitments,
basic units and the criteria for ordering these basic units into a classification".[26]

There is a widespread opinion in knowledge organization and related fields that such classes corresponds
to concepts. We can, for example, classify "waterfowls" into the classes "ducks", "geese", and "swans";
we can also say, however, that the concept “waterfowl” is a generic broader term in relation to the
concepts "ducks", "geese", and "swans". This example demonstrates the close relationship between
classification theory and concept theory. A main opponent of concepts as units is Barry Smith.[27] Arp,
Smith and Spear (2015) discuss ontologies and criticize the conceptualist understanding.[28]: 5ff The book
writes (7): “The code assigned to France, for example, is ISO 3166 – 2:FR and the code is assigned to
France itself — to the country that is otherwise referred to as Frankreich or Ranska. It is not assigned to
the concept of France (whatever that might be).” Smith's alternative to concepts as units is based on a
realist orientation, when scientists make successful claims about the types of entities that exist in reality,
they are referring to objectively existing entities which realist philosophers call universals or natural
kinds. Smith's main argument - with which many followers of the concept theory agree - seems to be that
classes cannot be determined by introspective methods, but must be based on scientific and scholarly
research. Whether units are called concepts or universals, the problem is to decide when a thing (say a
"blackbird") should be considered a natural class. In the case of blackbirds, for example, recent DNA
analysis have reconsidered the concept (or universal) "blackbird" and found that what was formerly
considered one species (with subspecies) are in reality many different species, which just have chosen
similar characteristics to adopt to their ecological niches.[29]: 141

An important argument for considering concepts the basis of classification is that concepts are subject to
change and that they change when scientific revolutions occur. Our concepts of many birds, for example,
have changed with recent development in DNA analysis and the influence of the cladistic paradigm - and
have demanded new classifications. Smith's example of France demands an explanation. First, France is
not a general concept, but an individual concept. Next, the legal definition of France is determined by the
conventions that France has made with other countries. It is still a concept, however, as Leclercq (1978)
demonstrates with the corresponding concept Europe.[30]
Hull (1998) continued:[26] "Two fundamentally different sorts of classification are those that reflect
structural organization and those that are systematically related to historical development." What is
referred to is that in biological classification the anatomical traits of organisms is one kind of
classification, the classification in relation to the evolution of species is another (in the section below, we
expand these two fundamental sorts of classification to four). Hull adds that in biological classification,
evolution supplies the theoretical orientation.[26]

Ereshevsky
Ereshefsky (2000) presented and discussed three general philosophical schools of classification:
"essentialism, cluster analysis, and historical classification. Essentialism sorts entities according to causal
relations rather than their intrinsic qualitative features."[31]

These three categories may, however, be considered parts of broader philosophies. Four main approaches
to classification may be distinguished: (1) logical and rationalist approaches including "essentialism"; (2)
empiricist approaches including cluster analysis. (It is important to notice that empiricism is not the same
as empirical study, but a certain ideal of doing empirical studies. With the exception of the logical
approaches they all are based on empirical studies, but are basing their studies on different philosophical
principles). (3) Historical and hermeneutical approaches including Ereshefsky's "historical classification"
and (4) Pragmatic, functionalist and teleological approaches (not covered by Ereshefsky). In addition,
there are combined approaches (e.g., the so-called evolutionary taxonomy", which mixes historical and
empiricist principles).

Logical and rationalist approaches

Logical division,[32] or logical partitioning (top-down classification or downward classification) is an
approach that divides a class into subclasses and then divide subclasses into their subclasses, and so on,
which finally forms a tree of classes. The root of the tree is the original class, and the leaves of the tree
are the final classes. Plato advocated a method based on dichotomy, which was rejected by Aristotle and
replaced by the method of definitions based on genus, species, and specific difference.[33] The method of
facet analysis (cf., faceted classification) is primarily based on logical division.[34] This approach tends to
classify according to "essential" characteristics, a widely discussed and criticized concept (cf.,
essentialism). These methods may overall be related to the rationalist theory of knowledge. Michelle
Bunn notes that logical partitioning uses categories which are established a priori; data is then collected
and used to test the extent to which the classification system can be sustained.[35]

Empiricist approaches
"Empiricism alone is not enough: a healthy advance in taxonomy depends on a sound theoretical
foundation"[36]: 548

Phenetics or numerical taxonomy[37] is by contrast bottom-up classification, where the starting point is
a set of items or individuals, which are classified by putting those with shared characteristics as members
of a narrow class and proceeding upward. Numerical taxonomy is an approach based solely on
observable, measurable similarities and differences of the things to be classified. Classification is based
on overall similarity: the elements that are most alike in most attributes are classified together. But it is
based on statistics, and therefore does not fulfill the criteria of logical division (e.g. to produce classes,
that are mutually exclusive and jointly coextensive with the class they divide). Some people will argue
that this is not classification/taxonomy at all, but such an argument must consider the definitions of
classification (see above). These methods may overall be related to the empiricist theory of knowledge.

Historical and hermeneutical approaches

Genealogical classification is classification of items according to their common heritage. This must also
be done on the basis of some empirical characteristics, but these characteristics are developed by the
theory of evolution. Charles Darwin's[38] main contribution to classification theory of not just his claim
"... all true classification is genealogical ..." but that he provided operational guidance for
classification.[39]: 90–92 Genealogical classification is not restricted to biology, but is also much used in,
for example, classification of languages, and may be considered a general approach to classification."
These methods may overall be related to the historicist theory of knowledge. One of the main schools of
historical classification is cladistics, which is today dominant in biological taxonomy, but also applied to
other domains.

The historical and hermeneutical approaches is not restricted to the development of the object of
classification (e.g., animal species) but is also concerned with the subject of classification (the classifiers)
and their embeddedness in scientific traditions and other human cultures.

Pragmatic, functionalist and teleological approaches

Pragmatic classification (and functional[40] and teleological classification) is the classification of items
which emphasis the goals, purposes, consequences,[41] interests, values and politics of classification. It is,
for example, classifying animals into wild animals, pests, domesticated animals and pets. Also
kitchenware (tools, utensils, appliances, dishes, and cookware used in food preparation, or the serving of
food) is an example of a classification which is not based on any of the above-mentioned three methods,
but clearly on pragmatic or functional criteria. Bonaccorsi, et al. (2019) is about the general theory of
functional classification and applications of this approach for patent classification.[40] Although the
examples may suggest that pragmatic classifications are primitive compared to established scientific
classifications, it must be considered in relation to the pragmatic and critical theory of knowledge, which
consider all knowledge as influences by interests.[42] Ridley (1986) wrote:[43]: 191 "teleological
classification. Classification of groups by their shared purposes, or functions, in life - where purpose can
be identified with adaptation. An imperfectly worked-out, occasionally suggested, theoretically possible
principle of classification that differs from the two main such principles, phenetic and phylogenetic
classification".

Artificial versus natural classification

Natural classification is a concept closely related to the concept natural kind. Carl Linnaeus is often
recognized as the first scholar to clearly have differentiated "artificial" and "natural" classifications[44][45]
A natural classification is one, using Plato's metaphor, that is “carving nature at its joints”[46] Although
Linnaeus considered natural classification the ideal, he recognized that his own system (at least partly)
represented an artificial classification.

John Stuart Mill explained the artificial nature of the Linnaean classification and suggested the following
definition of a natural classification:
 "The Linnæan arrangement answers the purpose of making us think together of all those
kinds of plants, which possess the same number of stamens and pistils; but to think of them
in that manner is of little use, since we seldom have anything to affirm in common of the
plants which have a given number of stamens and pistils."[47]: 498 "The ends of scientific
classification are best answered, when the objects are formed into groups respecting which a
greater number of general propositions can be made, and those propositions more important,
than could be made respecting any other groups into which the same things could be
distributed."[47]: 499 "A classification thus formed is properly scientific or philosophical, and
is commonly called a Natural, in contradistinction to a Technical or Artificial, classification
or arrangement."[47]: 499

Ridley (1986) provided the following definitions:[43]

"artificial classification. The term (like its opposite, natural classification) has many
meanings; in this book I have picked a phenetic meaning. A classificatory group will be
defined by certain characters, called defining characters; in an artificial classification, the
members of a group resemble one another in their defining characters (as they must, by
definition) but not in their non-defining characters. With respect to the characters not used in
the classification, the members of a group are uncorrelated.
"natural classification. Classificatory groups are defined by certain characters, called
'defining' characters; in a natural group, the members of the group resemble one another for
non-defining characters as well as for the defining character. This is not the only meaning for
what is perhaps the most variously used term in taxonomy ...

Taxonomic monism vs. pluralism

Stamos (2004)[48]: 138 wrote: "The fact is, modern scientists classify atoms into elements based on proton
number rather than anything else because it alone is the causally privileged factor [gold is atomic number
79 in the periodic table because it has 79 protons in its nucleus]. Thus nature itself has supplied the causal
monistic essentialism. Scientists in their turn simply discover and follow (where "simply" ≠ "easily")."

Examples of important taxonomies

Periodic table
The periodic table is the classification of the chemical elements which is in particular associated with
Dmitri Mendeleev (cf., History of the periodic table). An authoritative work on this system is Scerri
(2020).[49] Hubert Feger (2001; numbered listing added) wrote about it:[50]: 1967–1968 "A well-known, still
used, and expanding classification is Mendeleev's Table of Elements. It can be viewed as a prototype of
all taxonomies in that it satisfies the following evaluative criteria:

1. Theoretical foundation: A theory determines the classes and their order.

2. Objectivity: The elements can be observed and classified by anybody familiar with the table
of elements.
3. Completeness: All elements find a unique place in the system, and the system implies a list
of all possible elements.
 4. Simplicity: Only a small amount of information is used to establish the system and identify
an object.
5. Predictions: The values of variables not used for classification can be predicted (number of
electrons and atomic weight), as well as the existence of relations and of objects hitherto
unobserved. Thus, the validity of the classification system itself becomes testable."
Bursten (2020) wrote, however "Hepler-Smith, a historian of chemistry, and I, a philosopher whose work
often draws on chemistry, found common ground in a shared frustration with our disciplines’ emphases
on the chemical elements as the stereotypical example of a natural kind. The frustration we shared was
that while the elements did display many hallmarks of paradigmatic kindhood, elements were not the
kinds of kinds that generated interesting challenges for classification in chemistry, nor even were they the
kinds of kinds that occupied much contemporary critical chemical thought. Compounds, complexes,
reaction pathways, substrates, solutions – these were the kinds of the chemistry laboratory, and rarely if
ever did they slot neatly into taxonomies in the orderly manner of classification suggested by the Periodic
Table of Elements. A focus on the rational and historical basis of the development of the Periodic Table
had made the received view of chemical classification appear far more pristine, and far less interesting,
than either of us believed it to be."[51]

Linnaean taxonomy
Linnaean taxonomy is the particular form of biological classification (taxonomy) set up by Carl Linnaeus,
as set forth in his Systema Naturae (1735) and subsequent works. A major discussion in the scientific
literature is whether a system that was constructed before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution can still
be fruitful and reflect the development of life.[52][53]

Astronomy
Astronomy is a fine example on how Kuhn's (1962) theory of scientific revolutions (or paradigm shifts)
influences classification.[54] For example:

Paradigm one: Ptolemaic astronomers might learn the concepts "star" and "planet" by
having the Sun, the Moon, and Mars pointed out as instances of the concept “planet” and
some fixed stars as instances of the concept “star.”
Paradigm two: Copernicans might learn the concepts "star", "planet", and "satellites" by
having Mars and Jupiter pointed out as instances of the concept “planet,” the Moon as an
instance of the concept “satellite,” and the Sun and some fixed stars as instances of the
concept "star". Thus, the concepts "star", "planet", and "satellite" got a new meaning and
astronomy got a new classification of celestial bodies.

Hornbostel–Sachs classification of musical instruments

Hornbostel–Sachs is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich Moritz von
Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, and first published in 1914.[55] In the original classification, the top
categories are:

Idiophones: instruments that rely on the body of the instrument to create and resonate
sound.
Membranophones: instruments that have a membrane that is stretched over a structure,
often wood or metal, and struck or rubbed to produce a sound. The subcategories are
largely determined by the shape of the structure that the membrane is stretched over.
 Chordophone: Instruments that use vibrating strings, which are most commonly stretched
across a metal or wooden structure, to create sound.
Aerophones Instruments that require air passing through, or across, them to create sound.
Most commonly constructed of wood or metal.
A fifth top category,

Electrophones: Instruments that require electricity to be amplified and heard. This group was
added by Sachs in 1940.
Each top category is subdivided and Hornbostel-Sachs is a very comprehensive classification of musical
instruments with wide applications. In Wikipedia, for example, all musical instruments are organized
according to this classification.

In opposition to, for example, the astronomical and biological classifications presented above, the
Hornbostel-Sachs classification seems very little influenced by research in musicology and organology. It
is based on huge collections of musical instruments, but seems rather as a system imposed upon the
universe of instruments than as a system with organic connections to scholarly theory. It may therefore be
interpreted as a system based on logical division and rationalist philosophy.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a classification of mental disorders
published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).The first edition of the DSM was published in
1952,[56] and the newest, fifth edition was published in 2013.[57] In contrast to, for example, the periodic
table and the Hornbostel-Sachs classification, the principles for classification have changed much during
its history. The first edition was influenced by psychodynamic theory, The DSM-III, published in 1980[58]
adopted an atheoretical, “descriptive” approach to classification[59] The system is very important for all
people involved in psychiatry, whether as patients, researchers or therapists (in addition to insurance
companies), but the systems is strongly criticized and has not the scientific status as many other
classifications.[60]

Sample list of taxonomies

Business, organizations, and economics

Classification of customers, for marketing (as in Master data management) or for profitability
(e.g. by Activity-based costing)
Classified information, as in legal or government documentation
Job classification, as in job analysis
Standard Industrial Classification, economic activities

Mathematics
Attribute-value system, a basic knowledge representation framework
Classification theorems in mathematics
 Mathematical classification, grouping mathematical objects based on a property that all
those objects share
Statistical classification, identifying to which of a set of categories a new observation
belongs, on the basis of a training set of data

Media
Classification (literature), a figure of speech linking a proper noun to a common noun using
the or other articles
Decimal classification, decimal classification systems
Document classification, a problem in library science, information science and computer
science
Classified information, sensitive information to which access is restricted by law or
regulation to particular classes of people
Library classification, a system of coding, assorting and organizing library materials
according to their subject
Image classification in computer vision
Motion picture rating system, for film classification

Science
Scientific classification (disambiguation)
Biological classification of organisms
Chemical classification
Medical classification, the process of transforming descriptions of medical diagnoses
and procedures into universal medical code numbers
Taxonomic classification, also known as classification of species
Cladistics, an approach using similarities

Other
An industrial process such as mechanical screening for sorting materials by size, shape,
density, etc.
Civil service classification, personnel grades in government
Classification of swords
Classification of wine
Locomotive classification
Product classification
Security classification, information to which access is restricted by law or regulation
Ship classification society, a non-governmental organization that establishes and maintains
technical standards for the construction and operation of ships and offshore structures

Organizations involved in taxonomy

International Society for Knowledge Organization
 Classification Society.

See also
All pages with titles containing Taxonomy
The dictionary definition of taxonomy at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of classification scheme at Wiktionary
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
Faceted classification
Folksonomy
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, a population of organisms that a taxonomist adjudges to be a unit
Taxonomy for search engines
Thesaurus (information retrieval)
Typology (disambiguation)

Notes
1. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1910. (partially updated December
2021), s.v. (https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/198292)
2. review of Aperçus de Taxinomie Générale in Nature 60:489–490 (https://www.nature.com/ar
ticles/060489b0) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20230126084203/https://www.natur
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11074556/http://www.h%2Dits.org/english/research/nlp/papers/zirn08.pdf) (video lecture). (h
ttp://videolectures.net/eswc08_zirn_dbi/) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/2019122012
3127/https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140111074556/http://www.h-its.org/engli
sh/research/nlp/papers/zirn08.pdf) 2019-12-20 at the Wayback Machine 5th Annual
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External links
Media related to Taxonomy at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of taxonomy at Wiktionary
Taxonomy 101: The Basics and Getting Started with Taxonomies (http://www.kmworld.com/
Articles/Editorial/What-Is/Taxonomy-101-The-Basics-and-Getting-Started-with-Taxonomies-
98787.aspx)
Parrochia, Daniel 2016. "Classification" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/classifi/). In The Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy eds. James Fieser and Bradley Dowden.

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