Where does taxonomy collide?

Linnaeus's 1735 Systema naturae arranged living things into a nested set of ranks, from kingdom down through class, order, and genus to species, giving each kind a fixed place in one ordered system; Candolle's 1813 Théorie élémentaire de la botanique coined the word taxonomie for the theory of that arrangement. In this field the referent is the ranked classification of organisms itself, the grouping and naming of natural kinds by shared characters and, later, by shared ancestry. That is a system for ordering life in nature, and it is not a scale of learning goals, a theory of how ordinary people sort plants and animals, or a vocabulary built to retrieve documents.[1][2]

Unit

A named group of organisms fixed at a rank such as species, genus, or family

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Built by comparing characters, and now by inferring shared ancestry from morphology and DNA, under formal codes of naming

Bloom's 1956 Taxonomy of educational objectives borrowed the biological word by analogy and applied it to learning, arranging the goals of teaching in the thinking domain into ordered levels that rise from remembering facts at the base through comprehension and application to analysis, synthesis, and evaluation; Krathwohl's 2002 revision renamed and reordered the top levels and is the version most teachers now cite. Here the referent is a model of the mental operations a learner performs, ranked from simple to complex and used to write objectives and design assessments. It orders acts of thinking by difficulty, and it does not group organisms, describe how cultures sort nature, or index stored content.[3][4]

Unit

A stated learning objective placed at a cognitive level from remembering up to evaluation or creation

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Applied by classifying course objectives and test items against the level of thinking each one demands

Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven's 1973 General principles of classification and nomenclature in folk biology set out how human communities, independent of formal science, sort the plants and animals around them, and argued that these everyday classifications share a small set of universal ranks, from broad life forms down to named generic and specific kinds. In this field the referent is the categorizing behavior of people and cultures, a claim about how the human mind and language organize the living world. It studies the classifier rather than fixing an official order of nature, and it is not a learning model or a retrieval scheme.[5]

Unit

A folk category recognized by a community, placed at a rank such as life form or generic kind

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Recorded through fieldwork, naming tasks, and interviews that map the categories a community actually uses

Gilchrist's 2003 note Thesauri, taxonomies and ontologies traced how the word taxonomy was taken up in information work to name a controlled, usually hierarchical vocabulary that labels and groups documents and web content so that people can browse and find them again. Here the referent is a designed artifact for retrieval, a set of agreed terms arranged for navigation inside a website, intranet, or catalogue. It is engineered to organize stored content, and it does not name natural kinds, order learning goals, or describe how cultures categorize nature.[6]

Unit

A controlled term arranged in a browse hierarchy for tagging and finding content

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Built and evaluated by how well its terms support tagging, navigation, and retrieval of documents