Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!houxz!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!hplabs!sri-unix!MANN@USC-ISIB.ARPA From: MANN@USC-ISIB.ARPA Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: Taxonomy Assistant Message-ID: <12604@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Thu, 16-Aug-84 18:57:11 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12604 Posted: Thu Aug 16 18:57:11 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 22-Aug-84 01:04:09 EDT Lines: 36 From: Bill MannI 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]