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For the science of classifying living things, see alpha taxonomy. Taxonomy, sometimes alpha taxonomy, is the Science of finding describing and categorising Organisms thus giving rise to taxonomic groups or taxa

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. The word comes from the Greek τάξις, taxis, 'order' + νόμος, nomos, 'law' or 'science'. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly Taxonomies, or taxonomic schemes, are composed of taxonomic units known as taxa (singular taxon), or kinds of things that are arranged frequently in a hierarchical structure, typically related by subtype-supertype relationships, also called parent-child relationships. A taxon (plural taxa) or taxonomic unit, is a name designating an organism or a group of Organisms In Biological nomenclature according to @@@ main@@@ - title Hierarchy@@@ keywords structure; sociology; information@@@ review@@@ - In such a subtype-supertype relationship the subtype kind of thing has by definition the same constraints as the supertype kind of thing plus one or more additional constraints. For example, car is a subtype of vehicle. So any car is also a vehicle, but not every vehicle is a car. Therefore, a thing needs to satisfy more constraints to be a car than to be a vehicle.

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Applications

Originally the term taxonomy referred to the classifying of living organisms like cats (now known as alpha taxonomy); however, the term is now applied in a wider, more general sense and now may refer to a classification of things, as well as to the principles underlying such a classification. Taxonomy, sometimes alpha taxonomy, is the Science of finding describing and categorising Organisms thus giving rise to taxonomic groups or taxa

Almost anything — animate objects, inanimate objects, places, concepts, events, properties, and relationships — may be classified according to some taxonomic scheme.

The term taxonomy may also apply to relationship schemes other than parent-child hierarchies, such as network structures with other types of relationships. In Graph theory, a network is a digraph with weighted edges These networks have become an especially useful concept in analysing the interaction between Biology 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 a part of several different taxonomies.

A taxonomy might also be a simple organization of kinds of things into groups, or even an alphabetical list. However, the term vocabulary is more appropriate for such a list. In current usage within "Knowledge Management", taxonomies are seen as less broad than ontologies as ontologies apply a larger variety of relation types. Knowledge Management (KM An ontology in both Computer science and Information science is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between

Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy is a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. A tree structure is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a Structure in a graphical form It is also named Containment hierarchy. A containment hierarchy is a Hierarchical collection of strictly nested sets. 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 called "Organism" followed by nodes for the taxonomic ranks: Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, etc. Taxonomic rank ( rank, category, taxonomic category is an abstract term used in the Scientific classification, or Taxonomy, of organisms In biological Taxonomy, a domain (also superregnum, superkingdom, or empire) is the highest Taxonomic rank of Organisms In biological Taxonomy, a kingdom or regnum is a Taxonomic rank in either (historically the highest rank or (in the new three-domain system A phylum ( Plural: phyla) is a Taxonomic rank between Kingdom and above Class. A class is the Taxonomic rank in the Biological classification of organisms in Biology below phylum and above order.

Taxonomy and mental classification

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. Epistemology (from Greek επιστήμη - episteme, "knowledge" + λόγος, " Logos " or theory of knowledge Immanuel Kant (ɪmanuəl kant 22 April 1724 12 February 1804 was an 18th-century German Philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg Anthropologists have observed that taxonomies are generally embedded in local cultural and social systems, and serve various social functions. Cultural anthropology is one of four fields of Anthropology (the holistic study of humanity) as it developed in the United States. Perhaps the most well-known and influential study of folk taxonomies is Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Émile Durkheim ( April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French Sociologist whose contributions were instrumental

Various taxonomies

In phylogenetic taxonomy (or cladistic taxonomy), organisms are classified into clades, which are discovered by grouping taxa using derived traits. Phylogenetic nomenclature (PN is an alternative to rank-based nomenclature. A clade is a taxonomic group comprising a single Common ancestor and all the descendants of that ancestor By using clades as the criteria for separation, cladistic taxonomy, using cladograms, can categorize taxa into unranked groups. Cladistics is the hierarchical classification of Species based on evolutionary ancestry

In numerical taxonomy or taximetrics, the field of solving or best-fitting of numerical equations that characterize all measurable quantities of a set of objects is called cluster analysis. Numerical taxonomy or Phenetics is a Classification system in biological Systematics. Phenetics should not be confused with Phonetics, the study of speech sounds despite the similarity in pronunciation Clustering is the classification of objects into different groups or more precisely the partitioning of a Data set into Subsets (clusters

Non-scientific taxonomy

Other taxonomies, such 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 folk taxonomy is a Vernacular naming system, and can be contrasted with scientific taxonomy.

The neologism folksonomy should not be confused with "folk taxonomy" (though it is obviously a contraction of the two words). A neologism (from Greek neo = "new" + logos = "word" is a word that although devised relatively recently in a specific time period has been Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method Those who support scientific taxonomies have recently criticized folksonomies by dubbing them "fauxonomies" (French word "faux" means "false").

The phrase "enterprise taxonomy" is used in business to describe a very limited form of taxonomy used only within one organization. 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 An example would be a certain method of classifying trees as "Type A", "Type B" and "Type C" used only by a certain lumber company for categorising log shipments.

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In Philosophy, ontology (from the Greek, genitive: of being (part The Structure of Observed Learning Outcome ( SOLO) Taxonomy is a model that describes levels of increasing complexity in student's understanding of subjects The species problem is a mixture of difficult related questions that often come up when Biologists identify Species and when they define the word "species" Biological systematics is the study of the diversity of Life on the planet Earth both past and present and the relationships among living things through time

Dictionary

taxonomy

-noun

  1. (systematics, uncountable) The science of finding, describing, classifying and naming organisms.
  2. The classification in a hierarchical system.
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