Applied Cladistics: New Models for Classification and Taxonomy Research; or How the New York Review of Books Taught Me Everything I Needed to Know about Taxonomy Research

Abstract

This paper is about knowledge engineering and the design and development of knowledge representation structures to represent and support classification schemes in computers, particularly those based on the semantics of taxonomies and thesauri. The paper provides an interdisciplinary synthesis of research and methodology from many different sources-- artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering, computational linguistics, information retrieval-- but also from the new field of cladistics which has its origins in zoology, biology and paleontology.