1. Order method governed by associative and/or hierarchical elements.
2. Biology. Organizational system of living beings according to the determination of their biological characteristics, for example, by domain (which identifies eukaryotes, archaea and bacteria), kingdom (where the animalia, plants and fungi), to then continue segmenting by phylum, class… until reaching a floor where the species is located. It supposes a scientific field called taxonomy.
3. Organization of a set of things to facilitate their search.
4. System of evaluation or competition at the request of going to a higher level.
5. Ranking or general list whose participating references rise or fall positions dynamically according to the results obtained, generally updated monthly or annually.
Etymology: by latin classification, classificationisformed from classesas a ‘class’, the conjugation fic-regarding the verb facerefrom ‘to do’, and the suffix -tion, in Latin -uncle, -ōnis, in action-effect property. The Swedish naturalist Carlos Linnaeus (1707-1778) refers to and applies the word in the field of biology in 1767, in his work Systema Nature.
Grammatical category: noun fem.
in syllables: cla-si-fi-ca-tion.
Classification
Classification is the ordering or arrangement by classes. Basically, the classification will imply the search in a whole for all those things that have or share some type of relationship in order to group them. Generally, the primary objective of the classification is to find the best possible ordering, that is, the clearest, so that, when the time comes to search for a certain element that has been classified, it is easier to find: that is, primarily the end of all classification.
Now they can be done thousands of ratings different, on the basis of the most varied criteria. Companies can be classified by their origin, type or capital available. Plants can also be classified according to their habitat, the characteristics of their leaves, etc. Likewise, they can be classified from books to the living beings of planet Earth.
It is worth recognizing that the classification is inherent to the systematization of the sciences, for which reason, since the very birth of the scientific disciplines, multiple classification methods. The advent and massive diffusion of computer resources have made it possible for classification strategies to be perfected and simplified, for which reason data processing with information ordering is currently within everyone’s reach.
Meanwhile, below, we will expose some of the most common types of classification.
Taxonomy or biological classification It is the one that deals with ordering organisms in a classification system that has a hierarchy of taxa (related organisms). The modern classification of living beings divides them into 5 kingdoms (animal, plant, fungi, protista and monera), with successive subdivision into minor taxa (type or phylumclass, order, family, genus and species).
Then this the periodic classification or periodic table which is the one that distributes and organizes the different chemical elements, according to a certain type of characteristics. One of the most common may be the one that starts from the ordering of the physical properties of atoms. This is an interesting example of classification, since the parameter chosen for the ordering is the atomic number (number of protons present in the atomic nucleus of a given element), but the system also allows other informative variables to be included for each of the 92 natural elements and the multiplicity of artificial elements generated in the laboratory.
There is also the classification to order doctoral theses or better known as UNESCO classification since it was created by the aforementioned international organization and that it starts with two, four and six digits, for example code 11: logic, code 12: mathematics, etc. This system, beyond its digital systematization, continues to be the one chosen by this division of the United Nations dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge.
Meanwhile, the classification of books, of which we spoke above, is called universal decimal classification or CDU and is in charge of ordering the books in the libraries. What this does is divide knowledge into 10 large fields, each of these will have a number, such is the case of 1 for philosophy and psychology books, with this modality. This circuit is universal and allows the exchange of information about catalogs between libraries around the world.
Likewise, drugs are ordered by means of a classification system in which their international generic name and their therapeutic properties participate. Similarly, the World Health Organization has proposed its International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which is currently in its tenth edition (ICD-10). This strategy makes it possible to share data and information on the prevalence and incidence of the most varied conditions among professionals from all over the world, thus overcoming language barriers or the use of localisms to define a disease.
Finally, it is interesting to recognize that classifications, be they of the desired order, are part of the daily life of human beings, beyond the strictly academic or scientific field. As simple practical examples, classification systems are elements as common as street ordering, home addresses, traffic light coding, the monetary system, assigning grades in a school or university exam, prize scales in jobs and salaries and a host of other parameters that hide in all cases a form of classification…
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