Glossary Term: Classification Definition: Classification is the sorting of things into pre-defined categories. The best known classifications are perhaps libraries, where books are sorted into subject headings, and biological taxonomies, where living things are sorted into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. There are many well-known classification schemes, all very closely related to one another leading to great confusion in the use of their names. Among them you will find Taxonomy, Thesaurus, Polyhierarchy, MultipleHierarchy?, Faceted Classification, Topic Map, Semantic Network, Ontology, and the Semantic Web. Auto Classification programs attempt to classify content by analyzing documents and then assigning them to a pre-defined set of classes, made by categorization. Forming, sorting, apportioning, grouping, or dividing objects into classes to form an ordered arrangement of items having a defined range of characteristics, relationships, and distinctive differences. Classification systems may be taxonomic, mathematical, observed, or inferred, depending upon the purpose to be served. The purpose of classification is to describe the structure and relationships of objects to each other and to similar objects, and to simplify these relationships in such a way that general statements can be made about classes of objects, thereby achieving economy of memory and ease of manipulation. Univ. Vermont Related Terms: Categorization, Taxonomy IA Glossary Index | Back