"The study of networks has grown into a substantial interdisciplinary endeavor across the natural, social, and information sciences. Yet there have been very few attempts to investigate the interrelatedness of the different classes of networks studied by different disciplines. Here, we introduced a framework to establish a taxonomy of networks from various origins. The provision of this family tree not only helps understand the kinship of networks, but also facilitates the transfer of empirical analysis, theoretical modeling, and conceptual developments across disciplinary boundaries. The framework is based on probing the mesoscopic properties of networks, an important source of heterogeneity for their structure and function. Using our method, we computed a taxonomy for 752 individual networks and a separate taxonomy for 12 network classes. We also computed three within-class taxonomies for political, fungal, and financial networks, and found them to be insightful in each case."

Find myself wondering if one could develop an algorithm to "invent" a taxon that would maximally disrupt the resulting tree structure if added…