MANN@USC-ISIB.ARPA (08/17/84)
From: Bill Mann <MANN@USC-ISIB.ARPA> I would like to have some sort of computational aid for creating taxonomies. In trying to understand a collection of objects or data, often one of the most helpful things to do is to create a taxonomy of it. Comparing and classifying things makes one think about their attributes and how they relate. It also helps identify potential varieties of objects that are "missing." Often several attempts are required before a satisfactory result is achieved, which can involve a lot of bookkeeping and an overwhelming amount of detail, so much that significant patterns are missed. Also, there are skills for doing taxonomies, and I don't have them all. For all these reasons, it would be good to embed a lot of the support operations for creating a taxonomy in a program, one that would let the machine do bookkeeping, systematic evocation of data, consistency checking and some pattern identification, but still leave me in charge. (Perhaps it's already been done.) What sorts of tools are out there? Is this already embedded in some collection of intellectual prosthetics? Where should I look for such programs? Bill Mann [There are indeed tools for creating numerical taxonomies --- see the documentation for cluster analysis programs in statistical packages such as BMD, SPSS, SAS, etc. For other leads I would suggest the Pattern Recognition journal, the seven (massive) IEEE conferences on pattern recognition, and the Classification Society (c/o Dr. George W. Furnas, Room 2C-572, Bell Communications Research, Inc., Murray Hill, NJ 07974). Can anyone suggest available software for nonnumeric taxonomy construction or for handling the associated bookkeeping? -- KIL]
MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA (08/25/84)
From: Wayne McGuire <MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
The problems of systematically representing the conceptual
relations among a set of abstract objects in any knowledge domain go
right to the heart of much leading-edge AI research. All inferencing
is based, among other things, on implicit taxonomic understanding.
It seems to me that in the knowledgebase management systems which
I hope we will see developed in the near future will be embedded rich
resources for evoking and representing taxonomies. Semantic nets
provide an ideal scheme with which to do just that.
The most useful thinking about taxonomies and classification
theory appears not in the computer science literature, but at the
interface of library science, information science, and philosophy. The
leading journal in the field is _International Classification_ (which
should be available in any world class humanities library). It is
published (as I recall) three times a year, and is chockfull of
pointers to articles, books, dissertations, etc. in the world
literature on all aspects of classification theory.
You might want to scan the following subject headings in some
recent editions of the index _Library Literature_ (published by H. W.
Wilson): Classification analysis, Subject headings, Thesauri. File 57
(Philosopher's Index) and File 61 (LISA -- Library and Information
Science Abstracts) on Dialog are also fertile sources of information
on the literature about taxonomies and classification theory. There
are many insights in the theoretical writings on classification theory
in the library science literature which could be handily transferred
to advanced AI research and systems.
It occurs to me that what we need is a _meta-taxonomy_, that is,
a thorough inventory of all the fundamental conceptual structures by
which objects in _any_ domain can be taxonomically related.
One way a taxonomy assistant might operate is to combine each and
every significant term in a knowledge domain with every other term,
and offer a list of possible relations with which to tag each offered
matching set. Someday, perhaps, we will be able to buy off the shelf
"taxonomy packs" (dynamic thesauri) in many domains.
-- Wayne --