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Taxonomy (from Greek ταξινομία (taxinomia) from the words taxis = order and nomos = law) may refer to either the 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 heirachical in structure. However taxonomy may also refer to relationship schemes other than heirarchies, 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". A taxonomy might also be a simple organization of objects into groups, or even an alphabetical list.
Mathematically, a heirachical 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 Carolus Linnaeus's 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, 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. The most well-known and widely used scientific taxonomy is Linnaean taxonomy which classifies living things and originated with Carolus Linnaeus. This taxonomic system is accessible from the article evolutionary tree.
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.
In recent years taxonomic classification has gained support from molecular systematics, a branch of bioinformatics that employs the method of gene sequencing to construct phylogenetic trees.
The field of solving or best-fitting of numerical equations that characterize all measurable quantities of a set of objects is called in order to produce a taxonomy is called numerical taxonomy, taximetrics or cluster analysis.
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