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Taxonomy AI simulator

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Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a practice and science concerned with classification or categorization. Typically, there are two parts to it: the development of an underlying scheme of classes (a taxonomy) and the allocation of things to the classes (classification).

Originally, taxonomy referred only to the classification of organisms on the basis of shared characteristics. Today it also has a more general sense. It may refer to the classification of things or concepts, as well as to the principles underlying such work. Thus a taxonomy can be used to organize species, documents, videos or anything else.

A taxonomy organizes taxonomic units known as "taxa" (singular "taxon"). Many are hierarchies.

One function of a taxonomy is to help users more easily find what they are searching for. This may be effected in ways that include a library classification system and a search engine taxonomy.

The word was coined in 1813 by the Swiss botanist A. P. de Candolle and is irregularly compounded from the Greek τάξις, taxis 'order' and νόμος, nomos 'law', connected by the French form -o-; the regular form would be taxinomy, as used in the Greek reborrowing ταξινομία.

Wikipedia categories form a taxonomy, which can be extracted by automatic means. As of 2009, it has been shown that a manually-constructed taxonomy, such as that of computational lexicons like WordNet, can be used to improve and restructure the Wikipedia category taxonomy.

In a broader sense, taxonomy also applies to relationship schemes other than parent-child hierarchies, such as network structures. Taxonomies may then include a single child 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 simply be organization of kinds of things into groups, or an alphabetical list; here, however, the term vocabulary is more appropriate. In current usage within knowledge management, taxonomies are considered narrower than ontologies since ontologies apply a larger variety of relation types.

Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy is a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. It is also named containment hierarchy. 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. The progress of reasoning proceeds from the general to the more specific.

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classification of things or concepts, as well as to the principles underlying such a classification, categorization is based on discrete sets, different from meronymy which is dealing with the classification of parts of a whole
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