Taxonomy is the practice of arranging and classifying things to provide order and understanding. It can be used to organize anything from books in a library to personal collections. Humans have a natural tendency to engage in taxonomy, which helps them learn the relationships between objects and gain a greater understanding of the world. Taxonomy also allows people to define and name things, which can be helpful in communication.
Taxonomy is a practice where things are arranged and classified to provide order. A classic example of taxonomy is scientific or alpha taxonomy, the system used to classify all living organisms. As scientific taxonomy demonstrates, the process of classifying things performs a number of functions and can be extremely beneficial to a greater understanding of the objects, ideas, or organisms being classified.
This term comes from the Greek and literally means “method of disposition”. There are different ways to organize things, ranging from widely recognized coded taxonomic systems, such as the Dewey Decimal System, to personal systems that people use to organize things in a way that makes sense to them. For example, many websites categorize their content to make it easy for users to find specific topics of interest.
Humans seem to have a natural tendency to want to order and name things, and from an early age people engage in taxonomy, even if they are not fully aware of it. For example, children learn that bananas are a type of fruit, but not all fruits are bananas. This gives them a general category, “fruit,” and a subtype, “banana.” Over time, they may add more categories to the hierarchy, such as “tropical fruit” or “unripe banana.” In the process of sorting things and assigning names to them, the child learns the relationships between various objects in the taxonomy and gains a greater understanding of the world at large.
Almost any object collection can, and often is, be subject to taxonomy, from libraries, which are organized using cataloging systems to make books easier to find, to personal model aircraft collections, which can be organized by manufacturer, era, style and so on. In all cases, the organization of the objects is meant to bring order to the collection, and to allow people to see how the objects are connected.
Taxonomy also allows people to define and name things. In the banana example above, for example, a child learns that something with a distinctive yellow color and curved shape may be called a banana or a fruit, but that something that is round and red is not a banana, although it may be a fruit. Because the taxonomy of fruits is standardized, a child also knows that when he asks someone else for a banana, a banana will be produced, not an orange.
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