Dynamics of a taxonomy
As interesting as taxonomies are, they are most useful when used to start to dissect and analyze raw text. Taxonomies apply to unpredictable text. When an analyst encounters unpredictable text (and, at the end of the day most text is unpredictable), it is taxonomies that are used to start to understand the text. Fig 4.6 shows a simple example of how taxonomies are applied to raw text.
In the first sentence in the example there is raw text about a woman driving her car and her dog. The raw text could be anything. In the second sentence, two taxonomies have been selected: one for cars and one for types of dogs.
The raw text is examined. Each word in the raw text is compared to the specific words in the taxonomy. Two of the raw words are seen to have a match, “Porsche” and “poodle”.
In the third sentence the words that are matched have their general classification attached to the specific word. In this case the words “...
