A Dying Profession?

July 29, 2013 / Melody Smith /

Is taxonomy dying? The science of describing, naming, and classifying living things may be on the verge of extinction. This rather sobering topic was found on the Business Mirror in their article, “Taxonomy, a dying profession.”

Fewer students each year are taking taxonomy as a course, and the high-paying professions are overshadowing it as a career choice. What happens when we have no more taxonomists? Before a species can be protected, it must be identified and classified.

In the world of technology, taxonomists are fading away as well. The “on-demand” world we live in has decided that built-in taxonomies and word clouds have replaced the standards-based, solid taxonomies that provide for true findability of data.

Fortunately, there are organizations that disagree. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ISO/ANSI/NISO compliant taxonomies to produce comprehensive results.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.

1 Comment

  1. Andrew Karpie on July 29, 2013 at 5:31 pm

    Perhaps there should be a place for taxonomy in today’s emerging data science curricula?