Taxonomy

When you select the terms, you can select them from all those standard sources that might be available to you, like these: Existing taxonomies, thesauri, and classification schemes; Encyclopedias, lexicons, dictionaries, and glossaries; Books and journals, and their indexes; Databases; and Annual reviews and surveys. Also scan the literature in general; not just your literature but the literature of other publishers. I would encourage you to watch the international literature. A tremendous amount of what is happening these days is happening outside the United States. We tend to take a rather parochial view of what is happening in our own field and knowledge organization systems. I would say that there is more happening in Europe than in the United States at the moment. They are way ahead of us in actually getting taxonomic implementations done and pushing the envelopes for thinking. So, those of us in non-European countries need to need to pay attention to what is happening in Europe.

Earlier this year, you may recall, we demonstrated the far-reaching and all-encompassing nature of taxonomies when we highlighted the taxonomical approach sportswriters apply to making preseason baseball predictions in Of Taxonomies, Biology, and Moneyball. With the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympic Games, we could not pass up the opportunity to once again share some insights into two of our favorite things—sports and taxonomies!

There are several ways to create a taxonomy. One is from the existing data, which is my preferred method. You can also do it as an intellectual outline of the discipline, thinking about what ought to be included in this discipline. That is what the monks did many years ago in their cold towers on those mountainsides. Few of us have that luxury. Most of us will be dealing with a specific corpus of information.