Preserving Taxonomic Change and Subsequent Taxon Relationships over Time

Biodiversity research data often reference individual organisms, populations, or other taxonomic contexts by using scientific names. Scientific names, however, are unstable, ambiguous, and no precise identifier for the specific taxonomic concept that has been used implicitly. Using identifiers for taxonomic concepts instead does not fully solve the inherent semantic problems, since taxon concepts may evolve over time, therefore preserving and representing their relationships is critical for any subsequent analysis. We propose a model to represent and preserve the taxonomic change as Linked Data. The approach aims additionally at preserving the semantic relationships between the resulting taxon concepts as well as the temporal sequence of changes. Our model describes taxon relations as set-theoretical relations and thus makes use of the underlying semantics to enable automatic reasoning over the knowledge base.