Taxonomy
From dKosopedia
There are important differences between the terms "category", "classification", taxonomy, "vocabulary" and "term".
A taxonomy is a hierarchical classification, period. It has such a broad meaning that it won't lead to any insights. It should not be used, even in such composite terms as enterprise taxonomy (which can mean everything from organization chart to industry-standard ontology). The only essential feature of a taxonomy is that there is SOME way to say what classifications or tests apply. These tests aren't part of taxonomy itself - if they were, it would not be a taxonomy but an "ontology", a comprehensive list of "what is". A taxonomy is a VERY weak ontology.
Rather than waving hands and saying either word, non-experts should consider what they're trying to classify and by what attributes. If one wants to classify animals, for example, one may classify them according to their color, the number of their legs, their size, and so on. One may classify buildings by their size, the time they were built, architectural style, and so on. Now the different adjectives corresponding with a certain attribute define a vocabulary, consisting of only the proper terms to describe things. Now, assuming that you are in the category of non-expert, then:
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simple classifying
"Once you have found the attributes (vocabularies) with which you can describe your objects in a good way, you can go and tag them with terms of that vocabulary.
So far, we're still in good old "Excel" or relational database tables world: one row in a database table most often describes a certain entity according to its attributes. The possible values of such attributes are - if you want to - terms."
"What relational databases don't recognize is that there exist certain relationships between terms. Relational databases allow for relationship between entities, but not between the terms (values) describing them."
classification-driven search
"In fact, sometimes it would be desirable to create taxonomies of terms - hierarchical classifications - to search not only for entities having exactly that attribute value, but - for example - a parent term. What I mean is: the values in hierarchical databases are flat. For example, having tagged your content by type, it is difficult to formulate queries like "give me all entities which are of type document", if the content is tagged with more specific terms like "book", "article" or "master thesis". The database won't recognize the parent-child relationship between them, that book, article and master thesis are documents. So taxonomies of terms allow for more sophisticated queries."
terms aren't categories
"What is most important is that terms aren't categories. Terms are just that: terms, words, values, at most phrases. Foremost terms are used to describe things in different ways, but alone they're not of much use. For example, searching for all articles written in English might return a whole bunch of irrelevant content. Using a categorization according to type alone might return your whole website once the user searches for a term high above in the hierarchy like "object" or "content". Therefore, a single master vocabulary doesn't make much sense. Once the user clicks on "topics", he should get back all nodes which are a topic. At least according to my interpretation of vocabularies. Vocabularies all have the same importance."
"In the same way, categories aren't terms. As I said, the term "flower" means the class of all flowers (on earth) and you won't be able to return all flowers on earth on your web site. The only way to cope with a whole bunch of content nodes is to categorize them (according to your's or your users' liking), that's true, but there's a difference between categorizing terms and categorizing entities/content. When creating categories of content, the terms you have defined in your vocabularies can be used, but they are not categories themselves. Instead they describe classes of content != categories, which are rather sets of objects described by predicates, attributes - well - terms of vocabularies." This is exactly the way the term:namespace works: it removes from main namespace all of those terms that are attempting to describe things that may not exist or should not exist.
composite categories or "queries"
One way to create categories is with mathematical set operators like union, intersection and difference that operate on the sets represented by the categories (not the terms). The drupal software for instance provides union (+) and intersection (,) and with them one can already build some nice categories."
"That terms are not categories is also easy to see when you take a look at the glossary module for Drupal. The glossary module treats terms exactly the way I described them: as words. IMHO, that's the correct way to treat terms: the description of a vocabulary term should contain a definition for that term, like terms organized in a thesaurus. If you define the term "animal", the description would probably read like a scientific definition in an encyclopedia. That's normally not what users want so see on your website during normal browsing activities, and in that sense, the taxonomy_context module is somewhat stupid. Users want so see such things only when they're clicking on the term or browsing the glossary for your website, but a scientific definition doesn't belong into the header of a category page."
"In comparison, the description of a category might rather read like "An overview of all the bands in the late nineties which were in the top ten" or something like that. Now, go and find a single term for that, a term you'd normally find in a thesaurus or glossary. It's impossible!" Because that is not a term of general use. Therefore, a query is just a composite category and one can refer to a category as a "common query" if you really prefer.
why you care
Since framing is all about category manipulation, you simply can't engage in issue/position/argument debate without first considering what category or categories is assumed to exist by the issue statement itself, and what other taxonomic assumptions are made by each position. In general those positions that require the creation of the most questionable categories are the weakest.
Since it is not possible to define "better" or "worse" simply from position taking or issue statements/framing, and certainly not by arguments alone, there is great potential for manipulation of desire by reframing/changing categories. Vision/threat/status is one way to start to address this, by discovering exactly what is believed possible or not, and desirable or not, by different factions. But everyone must be aware of the manipulation of taxonomy to influence the emotional and creative and visionary process that is required to create scenarios: the possible futures that the positions try to shape. See scenario analysis on this.
Never challenging a standing taxonomy encourages groupthink and helps confuse probability, desirability, and thinkability of various outcomes. It may be necessary to acknowledge competing categories - see FrameTank.
The value of creative and visionary thinking and fictional scenarios as in science fiction and spy fiction came to be seen as a way to get to more fundamental categories. More recently the practice of video prototypes and exploratory engineering - basically the creation of real-seeming demonstrations and genuinely real specifictions for things that cannot actually be built but are known to be possible - have helped trigger consideration of breakthroughs, e.g. space travel, hot fusion, cold fusion, molecular engineering, etc.. Consideration of which challenges current earthbound assumptions about energy or materials.
Since low probability high impact cases are exactly those that alter our taxonomy, we like to ignore them. Vision/threat/status helps us not to.
This page is CC-by-nc-sa by Efficient Civics Guild. This version is released under GNU Free Documentation License with this notice as an Invariant Section, to ensure improvements remain under both licenses.
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