A taxonomy is a collection of controlled vocabulary terms organized into a hierarchical structure. Each term in a taxonomy is in one or more parent-child relationships to other terms in the taxonomy. There may be different types of parent-child relationships in a taxonomy (e.g., whole-part, genus-species, type-instance), but good practice limits all parent-child relationships to a single parent to be of the same type. Some taxonomies allow poly-hierarchy, which means that a term can have multiple parents. This means that if a term appears in multiple places in a taxonomy, then it is the same term. Specifically, if a term has children in one place in a taxonomy, then it has the same children in every other place where it appears.

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