1. A taxonomy control for an appliance having a software component configured to perform a cycle of operation on a physical article and for a controlling device for the appliance, the taxonomy control comprising: a dataset, stored in a medium, and describing attributes that contain a plurality of child values which represent valid values of the attributes, and derived from operational capabilities of the appliance for at least one state of the appliance, and a taxonomy operator in a processor to operate on the dataset, wherein the dataset is generated by the appliance in the at least one state, limited to the at least one state, and sent to the controlling device, whereby the controlling device can create well formed commands from the dataset as operated on by the taxonomy operator that can be executed by the appliance in the at least one state without need for a variant of the software component in the controlling device.