The human sense of responsibility and role in ethics have been under scrutiny since the beginning of time. Interest in responsibility has crossed domains as diverse as moral responsibility, leadership, social behavior, and education. Science Trends brought this interesting topic to us in their article, “The Mode Of Responsibility As An Individual Characteristic: Creating A Taxonomy For Responsibility.”
Definitions and descriptions of responsibility, determinants, and outcomes of responsibility, continue to be written and rewritten. Is there one thread that unites diverse approaches to responsibility and can be applied across domains?
The development of a multi-layered taxonomy of the different conceptualizations of responsibility has been proposed. The taxonomy facilitates distinguishing the conceptualizations of responsibility into one of two approaches, attributed or internalized, and then into one of four modes: philosophical, retrospective, prospective, or characteristic.
The purpose of a taxonomy is to translate natural language terms into a common set of terms that can be used across an entire knowledge domain. This is true whether the subject is human responsibility or dog breeds.
Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
