Taxonomic and Nomenclatural Status Terms Ontology

An Ontology for Nomenclatural and Taxonomic Status terms.

Available at:

https://www.purl.org/org.filteredpush/ontologies/taxonomic_nomenclatural_status_terms.owl

Version 0.8 Namespace: http://webprojects.huh.harvard.edu/ontologies/taxonomic_nomenclatural_status_terms.owl#

Competency questions this ontology is designed to address

• Queries on the ontology
  • Which nomenclatural status terms are synonyms under different codes (e.g. junior subjective synonym in zoology has the same meaning as later taxonomic synonym in botany)
  • Which nomenclatural status terms are generalizations of other more specific nomenclatural status terms? (E.g. synonym is more general than objective synonym).
  • Which terms used to describe the status of scientific names are terms resulting from nomenclatural actions, and which are terms resulting from taxonomic actions?
  • Which nomenclatural status terms apply to names governed by the ICZN?
  • Which nomenclatural status terms apply to names governed by the ICBN?
  • Which nomenclatural status terms apply to names governed by the ICNP?
  • Which nomenclatural status terms are used by which governing codes?
• Queries on data conformant with the ontology
  • For a set of taxon name appearances in a synonomy, which appearance is the usage that represents the author of the synonomy's view of the current name to use?
  • Given a usage bank and two different name strings, what is the list of opinions in the usage bank that these two name strings represent the same taxon, and what is the list of opinions in the usage bank that these two name strings represent different taxa.
  • Which taxon name usages are senior or earlier homonyms?

Here is a small set of the object properties included in the ontology:

Funding

Development of this ontology was driven by a Harvard-Australia Fellowship to James A. Macklin and Paul J. Morris, with additional support from GBIF for the Nomina VIII meeting at which the terms vocaublary which triggered the creation of this ontology was discussed. This ontology was further developed under the FilteredPush project, NSF DBI 0960535.