Taxonomy

Purpose

Taxonomy is the classification layer for organizing continuous variation into family/genus/species.

Terms

• species: a locally continuous variation class where smooth morphing between members is possible.
• genus: nearby species with shared local structural/behavioral organization.
• family: broader shared building-block style.
• continuity: absence of abrupt phase breaks along small parameter interpolations.

Current Status in This Dossier

Storage exists, assignment does not:

• taxonomy columns are present in compendium schema,
• current indexed corpus has null taxonomy IDs/method/version for all rows,
• no automatic taxonomy pass is run during indexing yet.

What We Use Before Full Taxonomy

Pre-taxonomy staging uses measured proxies:

• motion regime (center_velocity),
• path geometry (pathTortuosity),
• reproducible seed-level exemplars tied to concrete media.

Visual anchors used in this corpus:

Planned Taxonomy Pipeline (Conceptual)

1. canonicalize genotype (order-invariant kernel representation),
2. cluster into coarse families,
3. refine into genus/species with continuity checks,
4. persist taxonomy IDs with method/version provenance.

Related Docs

• schema and taxonomy storage fields: ../contracts/CompendiumSchema.md
• morphology features used for staging: Morphology.md and ../contracts/MorphometricsAndTraits.md
• decision record: ../decisions/ADR-001-taxonomy-status.md