How Taxonomies Differ From Ontologies

Over the years, I've had people ask me how a taxonomy differs from an ontology. The answer (or at least a reasonably simple answer) is that "a taxonomy is a tree shaped ontology". Way back in the early 18th century, a Swedish biologist by the name of Carl Linnaeus began a fairly ambitious project. He wanted to build a way of indexing animals and plants by their phenotypes - the ways that they are alike. His original taxonomy was fairly basic, but over the course of decades, he eventually created a system with a few thousand living entities. He used the French word Taxonomie, derived from the Greek term for an arrangement of knowledge, and the Linnaeus Taxonomy would go on to spark a revolution in biology as generations of scientists fitted new species into it.