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Proceedings of TDWG : Conference Abstract
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Matthew J. Yoder‡, Dmitry A. Dmitriev‡, José Luis Pereira§, Maria Marta Cigliano|
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Corresponding author: Matthew J. Yoder (diapriid@gmail.com)
Received: 14 Aug 2017 | Published: 14 Aug 2017
© 2017 Matthew Yoder, Dmitry Dmitriev, José Luis Pereira, Maria Marta Cigliano
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Yoder M, Dmitriev D, Pereira J, Cigliano M (2017) Design and use of NOMEN, an ontology defining the rules of biological nomenclature. Proceedings of TDWG 1: e20284. https://doi.org/10.3897/tdwgproceedings.1.20284
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Abstract
The most complex nomenclatural databases are developed not from community based efforts but from individuals who have encoded their understanding of the rules of nomenclature into bespoke knowledge-bases. In efforts spanning decades well over 75 types of “status” may to be defined for a single database. Reconciliation of these status types into new, federated systems is nearly always the most difficult aspect of their migration. Nomenclatural data is often recorded in a logically inconsistent manner, for example mixing governed rules and curator annotations. NOMEN (https://github.com/SpeciesFileGroup/nomen) is an Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology that seeks to address these issues, providing standardized URIs for classes of nomenclatural annotations on taxonomic names (not taxonomic concepts). It includes assertions for the animal (ICZN), plant (ICN), and bacterial (ICNB) codes. NOMEN based assertions can be encoded in a simple graph format, as illustrated in its implementation in TaxonWorks (http://taxonworks.org). We illustrate its application within the migration process of four very large taxonomic databases.
Keywords
ontology, biological nomenclature, OWL, application, ICZN, ICN
Presenting author
Matthew J. Yoder