What is Taxonomy?
A taxonomy is a hierarchical classification system that organizes concepts, entities, or categories into parent-child relationships, creating a tree-like structure of increasing specificity. Taxonomies provide a standardized way to categorize information, with broader categories at higher levels and more specific subcategories branching below them. For example, a biological taxonomy might classify organisms from kingdom to species, while a product taxonomy might organize items from broad categories like "Electronics" down to specific types like "Wireless Headphones."
The hierarchical structure of taxonomies enables several important capabilities: inheritance of properties from parent to child categories, efficient navigation from general to specific concepts, consistent classification across large information spaces, and support for faceted search and filtering. Each node in the taxonomy represents a category, and items can be classified by assigning them to one or more nodes based on their characteristics.
In AI systems, taxonomies serve multiple purposes: organizing knowledge bases for better retrieval, providing controlled vocabularies for metadata, enabling hierarchical filtering in search systems, and supporting reasoning about category memberships and relationships. While simpler than full ontologies (which include additional relationship types and logic), taxonomies provide valuable structure for many applications. Many systems combine taxonomic organization with semantic search, using the taxonomy to narrow search spaces or provide structured navigation while leveraging embeddings for similarity-based retrieval within categories.