The activity of developing the schemes bears similarity to taxonomy, but with perhaps a more theoretical bent, as a single classification scheme can be applied over a wide semantic spectrum while taxonomies tend to be devoted to a single topic.
In the abstract, the resulting structures are a crucial aspect of metadata, often represented as a hierarchical structure and accompanied by descriptive information of the classes or groups.
Such a classification scheme is intended to be used for the classification of individual objects into the classes or groups, and the classes or groups are based on characteristics which the objects (members) have in common.
Some quality criteria for classification schemes are: In linguistics, subordinate concepts are described as hyponyms of their respective superordinates; typically, a hyponym is 'a kind of' its superordinate.
This list is in approximate order from informal to more formal: One example of a classification scheme for data elements is a representation term.