This morning I came to think about the word ’taxonomy’ - (how it happened is a completely different story). Taxonomy is a term which was not entirely unfamiliar to me, but which I could only give a vague definition of. This morning that seemed odd as I remembered how it made very much sense to me when I was a student. A funny sounding word, which when first introduced to it, you have to have quite a good base of etymological knowledge to decipher. I had no idea what to make of ‘taxo’ anyway, so I googled it and found this article:
“A roadmap for proper taxonomy design” July 2003 by Claude Vogel
Reading the abstract I realized that the term seems too relevant to my combined work with object oriented design and pedagogic content, for me not to recognize it properly. Taxonomy is about the conceptual grouping of types on the basis of a specific perspective. This is basically what I do when as an e-learning developer I map learning goals to the data objects in my applications. The article reintroduced another concept ’ontolgy’ which was very central to me when as a student of Educational Science, I tried to find an answer to the question “what should be taught in school”. I have sometimes thought that the selection and organization of content could be the magic handle that when turned could change the way a people think (and the way our system works), so I used to read a lot of critisims of modernity. K. E. Løgstrup, a Danish philosopher used the term frequently in his critisism of rationalist definitions of language, to illuminate the problem of dualism in modern western philosophy, which he seemed to say was a simplistic reflection of the world that is a tool for modern man in his quest to being used to separate man kind from nature – not accepting the ontological qualitity of human action, thinking and knowledge.

except from the beginning of the article:
“A taxonomy is a hierarchical system describing the descending relationships between species and genera. Species derive from a common genus and, within a taxonomy, are hierarchically represented according to their essential characteristics and differences. For example, a thoroughbred is a type of a horse, which is an equid, which is a mammal and so on. Another useful term to know when defining a taxonomy my, is ontology. An ontology is a foundation of categories representing a particular organization’s view of its world. It also reflects the organization’s commonly used and trusted breakdown of those categories. For example, the logical breakdown that a news broadcast organization might use for its news items: World, Sports, Politics, etc., is ontological.”