Requirements for a better Business Taxonomy Part 1

Most business taxonomies, I have seen, are hierarchical with parent and child relationships. A good example may be cloud computing. The term is new and kind of vague, but it can be divided into various sub categories like cloud computing hosting like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure which will host virtual machines on the cloud, or cloud computing infrastructure services like cloud based backup services or antivirus services. However, if you see a cloud application that is specially oriented towards a given vertical like Healthcare which has special requirements like HIPPA, do you want to create a cloud subcategory for healthcare. What if there is a licensed software which manages Electronic Medical Records and is HIPPA compliant but does not run in the cloud. Do you create a subcategory for Healthcare under licensed software too? Then how do you find all the HIPPA compliant solutions? It seems that you need to categorize businesses in multiple ways. In effect, you should have a multi-dimensional hierarchical taxonomy to be able to better categorize and hence find businesses in any database. More on what these categories should be in my next post!