Uma revisão integrativa sobre taxonomias e web semântica: trajetórias, convergências e interdisciplinaridade

Abstract

From “documentary chaos” to the “web of data” (as websemantics is known), we are faced with an informational explosion that will not decrease in intensity, especially in the virtual world. This is a matter that demands the identification of best practices and strategies for organizing information on the web and disseminate knowledge in a broader and more democratic way. In Information Science (IS), taxonomies are logical classification and categorization systems with multiple applications, used mainly in digital environments for organizing and navigating content, understandable by humans and machines. In this context, a qualitative, theoretical, descriptive and documentary research was designed, undertaken in two stages: narrative review in the domains of organization and retrieval of information and knowledge and the semantic web, and Integrative Review (IR), to update and systematize the state of the art of taxonomies in IS and their relationship with the semantic web. The IR used methods recommended by the Toronto and Remington and the Cochrane Library guides. Searches were carried out in the Oasisbr and Scopus databases with the terms “taxonom* AND semantic* AND web*” in combination to retrieve primary studies published from 2019 onwards, in English and Portuguese, that addressed the relationship between taxonomies and the semantic web in IS and related areas, excluding studies in biology, zoology and botany. The strategy resulted in 237 studies after duplicates and the selection process had two stages, a scanning stage that resulted in 67 studies for eligibility and another complete study reading, with the final selection of 55 studies for analysis and thematic synthesis. The results pointed out unusual functions for taxonomies on the semantic web, which with versatility currently serve the semantic enrichment of large multimodal corpus, context information, risk management, conflict detection and management of household appliances in smart homes. New fields are revealed in dialogue with IS, such as data science, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A glossary and a bilingual taxonomy are products of the research, which seeks to contribute to scientific production in Portuguese, in addition to the development of the topic of taxonomies in Brazil.