Taxonomy
I’ve received some interesting reactions to the news that I’m a taxonomist. One that seems logical at first is for my new acquaintance to ask, “Oh, do you specialize in mammals, birds or fish?”
My response is, “Actually, I don’t do the scientific classification of animals, although I have done some environmental and biological classification from the popular viewpoint. Most often I work in the corporate field.”
Eliciting, “Huh? I thought you said you stuffed animals!?!”
Taxonomy isn’t one of the more common subjects of conversation at social gatherings, but many of those party-goers have used taxonomies without knowing it.
Taxonomy is about organizing things into groups so that they are easier to find. In a grocery store, there are different sections for the baked goods, dairy products, fruit and vegetables, and meat. If we look more closely at the meat section, there’s the deli, frozen, prepackaged, and seafood sections. The prepackaged section is usually divided into beef, chicken and pork.
Holy cow! That’s a three-tiered taxonomy!
This process of starting with a big topic and then narrowing it down through levels of specifics has been used in scientific classification for a long time (heck, they use Latin!). The more popular uses of taxonomies have been in the organization of inventories and information collections. With the development of the internet, it is now used to support website navigation and information discovery, like that web classic, the Yahoo! Directory.
Black Cat Indexing can help you categorize your information collection for information discovery and resource management purposes.