Taxonomy

The debate over faith and a belief in a higher power managed to bring a perfect example of taxonomy to clarity. This interesting, thoughtful and somewhat humorous topic was inspired by the article, “Haught v. Coyne: The Debate of the Century (Not)” on Evolution News and Views.

What is innovation management? It is similar to content management or content sharing. Maybe it should be called content liberation software since sharing knowledge is the acceptable behavior. How should a company approach innovation since it rarely just happens?

Combing content, commerce and community can be a trifecta of problems. Making two of these work well together is a challenge, three is, well, hard. The problem is that content, commerce and community are generally managed in different systems.

Just the word taxonomy can confuse people, let alone the application. First they ask, “oh is that where you preserve dead animals?” Then they think it has something to do with the IRS. When you finally get them to understand it is a classification system, they have flashbacks to high school biology class. Taxonomy unfortunately has that effect on many, and that is sad. It is just bringing order to a group of items and identifying relationships. It’s not rocket science.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the European Commission (EC) have agreed on the use of a single repository and common categorization taxonomy to report all aviation accidents and incidents worldwide in order to improve aviation safety.