Taxonomy

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

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
• 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

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]

• 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

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

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)

• 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

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

Since 2012, several major academic and scientific publishing bodies have 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

As of mid-2018, this taxonomy apparently restricts its scope to research outputs, specifically journal articles; however, it does rather unusually "hope to … support identification of peer reviewers".[18] (As such, it has not yet defined terms for such roles as editor or author of a chapter in a book of research results.) Version 1, established by the first Working Group in the (northern) autumn of 2014, identifies 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

Reception has been mixed, with several major publishers and journals planning to have implemented CRediT by the end of 2018, whilst almost as many aren't persuaded of the need or value of using it. For example,

The National Academy of Sciences has created a TACS (Transparency in Author Contributions in Science) webpage to list the journals that commit to setting authorship standards, defining responsibilities for corresponding authors, requiring ORCID iDs, and adopting the CRediT taxonomy.[19]

The same webpage has a table listing 21 journals (or families of journals), of which:

• 5 have, or by end 2018 will have, implemented CRediT,
• 6 require an author contribution statement and suggest using CRediT,
• 8 don't use CRediT, of which 3 give reasons for not doing so, and
• 2 are uninformative.

The taxonomy is an open standard conforming to the OpenStand principles,[20] and is published under a Creative Commons licence.[18]

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.[21]

Guidelines for writing taxonomy for the web include:

• Mutually exclusive categories can be beneficial. If categories appear several places, it's 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.[21]
• 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.[21]