Taxonomy is the science of classification – a basic means of understanding the world around us. It is also key in the act of identifying and archiving. This interesting topic came to us from Reflector in their article, “Anthropology students help reclaim history of local cemeteries.”
East Carolina University students in the Department of Anthropology are helping recover and catalog abandoned cemeteries across eastern North Carolina. Some anthropological perspectives on classification systems have been extensively studied by cognitive anthropologists; the area of work is often referred to as ethnoscience. The conclusions and generalizations from this work are relevant to the design and use of classification systems to support information retrieval applications.
A controlled vocabulary is needed to ensure that machine-assisted or fully automated indexing is comprehensive, regardless of what you are indexing. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies to make their information findable.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
