Design and use of NOMEN, an ontology defining the rules of biological nomenclature.

DIMITRIEV, D.; PEREIRA, J.; YODDER, M. ; CIGLIANO, M. M.

Congreso; TDWG 2017 Annual Conference, 1-6 October 2017, Ottawa, Canada. Data Integration in a Big Data Universe: Associating Occurrences with Genes, Phenotypes, and Environments; 2017

The most complex nomenclatural databases are developed not from community basedefforts but from individuals who have encoded their understanding of the rules ofnomenclature into bespoke knowledge-bases. In efforts spanning decades well over 75types of ?status? may to be defined for a single database. Reconciliation of these statustypes into new, federated systems is nearly always the most difficult aspect of theirmigration. Nomenclatural data is often recorded in a logically inconsistent manner, forexample mixing governed rules and curator annotations. NOMEN (https://github.com/SpeciesFileGroup/nomen) is an Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology that seeks toaddress these issues, providing standardized URIs for classes of nomenclaturalannotations on taxonomic names (not taxonomic concepts). It includes assertions for theanimal (ICZN), plant (ICN), and bacterial (ICNB) codes. NOMEN based assertions can beencoded 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 largetaxonomic databases.