1. A method for automatically classifying traffic in a packet communications network, said network having any number of flows, including zero, comprising the steps of: parsing a packet into a first flow specification, wherein said first flow specification contains at least one instance of any one of the following: a protocol family designation, a direction of packet flow designation, a protocol type designation, a pair of hosts, a pair of ports, in HTTP protocol packets, a pointer to a MIME type; thereupon, matching the first flow specification of the parsing step to a plurality of classes represented by a plurality nodes, each node having a traffic specification; thereupon, if a matching node was not found in the matching step, associating said first flow specification with one or more newly-created nodes; thereupon, incorporating said newly-created node into said plurality of nodes.