Taxonomy Design

Abstract

“Think simple” as my old master used to say— meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles. Frank LloydWright, 1867–1959 This chapter discusses the design of taxonomies to be used in dynamic taxonomy systems. Although the only actual requirement of dynamic taxonomies is a multidi- mensional classification, i.e., objects are classified under more than one concept, an organization by facets is normally used. In the first section, we provide guidelines for the design ofDT taxonomies, which include the automatic construction from structured data, and the retrofitting of tradi- tional monodimensional taxonomies. In the second section, we show how a faceted taxonomy can be automatically extracted from the infobase itself when objects are textual or are described by textual captions or tags.