Elaboration |
The father of the modern practice and science of classification - qua taxonomy - was the Swedish botanist and physician Carolus Linnaeus (1707 - 1778).
Still the most important aspect of the method of classifying living things that Linnaeus devised - Linnaean taxonomy, which is accordingly named after him - is the general use of binomial nomenclature, the combination of a genus name and a single specific epithet to uniquely identify each species of organism, e.g. Homo sapiens.
A Linnaean taxonomy, as in any taxonomic scheme, is composed of taxonomic units known as taxa arranged in a hierarchical network structure, typically related by parent-child relationships: sitemaps are classic examples of (content) taxonomies of course.
Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy - also called a containment hierarchy - is a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. At the top of this structure is a single classification, the root node, that applies to all objects. Nodes below this root are more specific classifications that apply to subsets of the total set of classified objects.
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