Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Taxonomy Jargon Explained

What’s the difference between Taxonomies and Ontologies? - Ask Dr. Search at New Idea Engineering (June 2009)

Excellent question - excellent answer. These words are often interchangeable - but it depends on the person, as Dr Search explains. The casual user might use either term, but the "deep researcher" might prefer ontology. Dr Search suggests that ontology is the big sweeping pictureof knowledge, and the taxonomy more specific subject domain. There are differences in understanding in computer science context also.



"Beyond academic precision, ontologies try to represent knowledge in a form so carefully that even computers can derive meaning by traversing the various relationships. If a computer were actually relying on this data you can understand that the “is-a” relationship in “Obama is-a president” and “my boss is-a huge pain” have slightly different meanings, the former conferring a job function, the latter a behavioral attribute. Unless you are a researcher or vendor of this technology, most people don’t need to worry about this.

Taxonomies can also be read and used in computer software, for example Verity’s Topic Sets were a form of taxonomy, and could be loaded into a profiler to classify incoming documents; many other companies have had this idea as well. But the linkages between parent and child branches were much simpler in nature, and were designed to simply combine fulltext search terms in various ways. There was no hint of “understanding” in the relationship between a parent and child, beyond simple fulltext matching. This was still very advanced for its time (the late 1980s), but it didn’t attempt to encode meaning."



There are many other terms that may come into the discussion that are related to use of taxonomies such as topic trees, knowledge base, folksonomy (not the same at all), tagging. and sometimes natural language processing (which might be used to help create a taxonomy) and metadata.

Taxonomy is also discussed in Do You Need A Taxonomy? where it is explained that there are three types: Subject based (a subject domain), Content based (derived from the content), and Behaviour (not as clear - might be usage).

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