Perspectives: Towards a language for mapping relationships among taxonomic concepts

Abstract

Taxonomic concepts (sensu Berendsohn) embody the underlying meanings of scientific names as stated in a particular publication, thus offering a new way to resolve semantic ambiguities that result from multiple revisions of a taxonomic name. This paper presents a comprehensive and powerful language for representing the relationships among taxonomic concepts. The language features terms and symbols for concept relationships within a single taxonomic hierarchy, or between two related but independently published hierarchies. Taxonomic concepts pertaining to a single hierarchy are characterised by parent/child relationships, whereas those pertaining to two independent hierarchies may have the following basic relationships: congruence, inclusion (non‐symmetrical, relative to the side of comparison), overlap, and exclusion. The relationships are asserted by specialists who have the option to add or subtract concepts on one or both sides of a relationship equation in order to reconcile differences between non‐congruent taxonomic perspectives. The terms ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘not’ are available, respectively, to connect multiple simultaneously or alternatively valid relationship assessments, or to explicitly negate the validity of a relationship. The language also permits the decomposition of a relationship according to the intensional (property referencing) and ostensive (member pointing) aspects of the compared taxonomic concepts. Adopting the concept relationship language will facilitate a more precise documentation of similarities and differences in multiple succeeding taxonomic perspectives, thereby preparing the stage for an ontology‐based integration of taxonomic and related biological information.