What Is Taxonomy?

Though the concept of taxonomy may be new to you as it relates to managing information within a portal, the basic concept has been used widely for quite some time in a number of disciplines. Taxonomy provides a structure that serves to bring order to a particular area of knowledge.

In biology, arguably the king of taxonomies was devised by Carolus Linnaeus in 1858. He created a simplified system of classification of all living things (binomial nomenclature ) that is still in use today. The classification begins with the most general groupings (kingdoms: Animalia, Plantae) to the most specific (species: rodentis, carnivora) (Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1. Binomial Nomenclature Used to Classify Plants and Animals

This classification system includes all living things. For example, human beings fit within the following categories in the taxonomy, as shown in Figure 10.2.

Figure 10.2. Humans in Binomial Nomenclature

Biologists use the attributes of a living thing to place it properly within this structure. This system has helped biologists in a number of areas by providing a structure within which theories , and eventually biological laws, can be deduced .

People employ taxonomies in their everyday lives to help find things. If I were to ask you to get those crazy red socks that I've seen you wear to work, you would simply go into your bedroom to your chest of drawers, and open your sock drawer. Without knowing it, you have used your own organizational taxonomy to help you locate those red socks. You have many places to store things in your home, so how did you know to go to the bedroom and then the sock drawer ?

Suppose that you have a living room and a bedroom in your home, and the living room contains two storage cabinets , a bookcase , and a TV cabinet. Moving on to your bedroom, you have a chest of drawers and a wardrobe in which you store most of your clothes. In your chest of drawers, you store socks and underwear in the top drawer and t-shirts and sweaters in the bottom drawers. You also store items of clothing in the wardrobe, though you reserve the wardrobe for clothes that should be hung up, such as pants and dress shirts. As a result, you think of this piece of furniture as the hanging clothes wardrobe. To be more precise, you might decide to create a map to help you visualize this organizational scheme (see Figure 10.3). This figure is analogous to the knowledge map you create for a portal.

Figure 10.3. Sample Storage Taxonomy for a Home

The vocabulary we have created is highly specific: The terms "clothes drawer" and "hanging clothes wardrobe" refer to items within your home. In other words, by developing this taxonomy, we are making the inherent assumption that you know what is meant by these terms. Taxonomy is a specialized view of content. As you searched for the socks in the sample scenario, you said to yourself that socks are an article of clothing and all articles of clothing are stored in your bedroom in either your closet or your drawer, and small objects belong in a drawer rather than hanging in a closet. In essence what we have done here is to create our own vocabulary to describe the organization of elements within your home.

Organizations that deal with different bodies of knowledge end up with different taxonomies. A manufacturer would have a different taxonomy than a reseller or a services company. Even companies in the same industry can end up with different taxonomies because their business models differ and the value they place on different kinds of information varies.

Applications for Taxonomy

Taxonomy structures can be used in a variety of ways, such as helping researchers find source materials, readers locate information in a book, or web site visitors locate information in an electronic journal. Taxonomies are used by buyers to locate products and services. They are employed by business decision makers to locate sources of expertise and to build communities of practice that include experts who are working on related research issues.

Taxonomy structures can also make automated processes more efficient. For example, taxonomy terms can be used in a search engine query to help users find information more easily or in a filtering program to personalize email alerts or web sites. Taxonomy applications have three key elements: people, tasks , and sources (of content). Note that the same taxonomy structure can serve multiple applications and can be applied to different kinds of content, including articles, books, videos , speeches, and so on.

A number of companies such as Inxight Software, Mohomine, and Metacode claim to interpret the semantic content of any textual document and automatically classify text on the fly. They use:

• Lists of standard terms (such as "maritime" instead of "ocean" as the standard term )

• Hierarchical relationships ("transportation" is subordinate to "industries")

• Cross-references (shipping via boat can be called "sea transport" or "maritime transportation")

Despite automated tools for this task, most analysts still develop taxonomy with no more than their wits. I follow this approach here to better understand the process.