In the field of information modeling and knowledge modeling, a taxonomy is a way to sort out a complex body of knowledge, by providing a structure of definitions and categories, to help you find your way quickly, and see which pieces of information belong together.
An easy example is the taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus, which was used to organize all the animals of the animal kingdom into like groups. This gives us the concept of animal families, etc - mammals, canines, and so forth.
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| Carl Linnaeus' Taxonomy (example) |
One of the things I would like to do, based on a series of games played in ODMS recently, is to come up with a taxonomy for WW2 micro armor rules. So the first thing is to come up with some of the categories of concepts that apply to different rules.
Off hand, I can think of these:
- Scale (i.e. how many vehicles does a tabletop model represent)
- Turn Sequence
- Friction/Fog of War
- Command & Control/Morale
- Hit mechanism
- Kill mechanism
- Acquisition/Spotting rules
I will have to come up with ways to divide and recognize the features in each of these areas, and then come up with a reasonable (but finite) categorization system for the WW2 rules we have played recently.
This will be interesting to see what you come up with and how you build a classification scheme.
ReplyDeleteJonathan - I'll post something here. I have come up with a couple of categories, but I'm trying to come up with typical answers for each, so it is more of a numeric rating for each category, and not just free text (it will make searching and statistics easier to think about).
ReplyDeleteChuck