Taxonomies, Ontologies And Machine Learning: The Future Of Knowledge Management

As an ontologist, I'm often asked about the distinctions between taxonomies and ontologies, and whether ontologies are replacing taxonomies. The second question is easy to answer: "No." Both taxonomies and ontologies serve vital, and often complementary, roles ... if they are used right. A taxonomy is, to put it simply, a categorization scheme. Most readers should be familiar with a few critical taxonomies such as the Linnaeus Taxonomy used to represent how animals are related to one another, and the Dewey Decimal System for libraries, which represents subject areas of interest.