Discussion on Taxonomy vs. Ontology

[Ludee]

Description of the issue

There are differences but there are also similarities. Can we document this?

• Community efforts vs. political decision
• Main difference: only hierarchy vs. more properties and connections

It is a good time to advertise the OEO, since a lot of people are talking about definitions.

Good example:

• RE-share https://openenergy-platform.org/ontology/oeo/OEO_00140133 RE-share is a process attribute that indicates the fraction of renewable energy related to the total energy of an energy generation or consumption process.

• renewable https://openenergy-platform.org/ontology/oeo/OEO_00030004 Renewable is an origin of portions of matter or energies that replenish on a human time scale.

Ideas of solution

Gather information about the taxonomy and the ontology. Prepare a discussion for the OEO-SC-Meeting. Define a suitable output format.

Workflow checklist

• [x] I am aware of the workflow for this repository

[l-emele]

Btw, RE-share includes in the definition the link to renewable energy, but currently has no axiom for that.

[l-emele]

Community efforts vs. political decision

I think, a taxonomy is not a political decision per se. In biology, the taxonomy is a central concept developed by the scientists over centuries.

However, as I understand it, in the economic and fiscal domains, the term taxonomy not only used as hierarchical structure, but also as some kind of rule set.

[stap-m]

For me, the questions are more complex:

• What is the difference between a taxonomy and an ontology from a computer science (or other) perspective?
• What is the difference between the EU taxonomy and a domain onlogogy like the OEO?
  • regarding purpose
  • regarding development process
  • regarding structure

Maybe it helps to collect more examples for taxonomies. As @l-emele indicated, there are some in biological and economic contexts. Are they comparable to what the EU taxonomy is?

[l-emele]

This discussion is not related to a release, thus I remove the release milestone.

[l-emele]

Is this discussion still relevant or can we simply close this issue?