Taxonomy

Taxonomy in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Taxonomy in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Taxonomy may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. The term taxonomy comes from the Greek for arrangement or division (taxis) and law (nomos). Thus it refers to rules of division and arrangement. Such rules can be much more uniform and strict within a facet, so the traditional use of this term for classification within a single facet is still appropriate. Thus, the rules for zoological taxonomic classification are often rather narrowly focused on physical characteristics (e.g., back-bones or not, resulting in vertebrates versus invertebrates) and ancestry/evolution.