OWL Representations Of Taxonomic Information

OWL Representations Of Taxonomic Information

Flatness vs Depth

To support the standard description logic reasoners, the representation of taxonomic information needs to be flat. This means that all taxa are considered instances of some taxon object. Therefore, there is no class hierarchy of taxa, they're all related via properties such as hasParent, hasChild, hasSynonym, etc.

This won't be any good for situations in which we want to leverage the natural class hierarchy to do some reasoning. For example, if we know that specimen A is an instance of species B it would be nice to be able to infer the genus, family, class, etc of that specimen using the class hierarchy.

It might not be difficult to transform a flat version of the taxonomic representation into a deep one. Basically, you would take each instance of the Taxon object in the flat version and

1. if that instance is a child of another, declare that instance as a new subclass of its parent
2. if it's not, just declare it as a new class
3. create a hasPrototype relation which has a maxCardinality of one and hasValue the instance under consideration.