Geopolitical Taxonomies on Airline Websites

Abstract

This study examines how corporate taxonomies on airline websites represent contested geopolitical entities, with a focus on Taiwan and nearby East Asian locations. We collected and analyzed country taxonomy data from 55 airline websites, transforming drop-down menu structures into hierarchical taxonomic models. We identified six distinct taxonomies and validated them through an annotation process with high inter-coder reliability. In this paper, we highlight three out of six representative taxonomies that vary in how they frame contested entities either as a standalone entity, as part of a regional group, or nested under China. These findings reveal how design choices in website interfaces can encode different geopolitical assumptions. In future work, we will study how users interpret these models to explore the possibility of presenting multiple geopolitical perspectives.