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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
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From:  Bill Mann 

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]