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Table 2 The core properties of the Taxonomic Meta-Ontology and their explanations

From: Making species checklists understandable to machines – a shift from relational databases to ontologies

Property

Explanation

Citation-related properties

 

occursInChecklist

Reference to a species checklist

auctorumYear

The year of original publication

completeAuctorumString

Author name(s) expressed according

 

to the established practices of taxonomy

Name-related properties

 

hasNonvalidName

Expresses synonyms, homonyms

 

and orthographic variants of a valid

 

scientific name

hasVernacularName

The common name equivalents for

 

the scientific names

hasNomenclaturalCode

Specifies the set of rules that are applied

 

(ICN [55] or ICZN [56])

hasVernacularNameStatus

Expresses whether a common name is

 

accepted or an alternative one

rdf:type

Expresses the hierarchical level in

 

a classification. The ranks are obtained

 

from TDWG Taxon Rank LSID Ontology [57].

 

Every taxon is an instance of a specific

 

taxonomic rank and the class

 

TaxonInChecklist (Figure 3).

  1. See other properties in the Results section, in subsection Taxonomic Meta-Ontology.