Taxacom: Ontologies (was Re: Taxacom Digest, Vol 221, Issue 10)

[Douglas Yanega]

On 9/24/24 5:40 AM, Jose Fernandez-Triana via Taxacom wrote:
> Speaking of which, I wanted to mention that yesterday we published a paper
> in ZooKeys with a key to European genera of a difficult group of parasitoid
> wasps. Difficult not only because of being a very diverse group, full of
> homoplasies and with many morphologically indistinguishable species, but
> also because different workers have used different terminologies over the
> years, especially for wings. We decided to illustrate all systems of
> venation used historically in Europe, as well as illustrate (and discuss)
> many morphological terms commonly used among different European schools
> over the past century.

As a side note, I'll add that the paper Jose refers to makes use of an 
online resource, the Hymenoptera Anatomy and Ontology (HAO) website 
(https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fportal.hymao.org%2Fprojects%2F32%2Fpublic%2Fontology%2F&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C42e7563b29754be53cec08dcdcab28cf%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638627874901429401%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=dVc%2FrHophtDYNEqOqcq3HdWLPDb4x6cOOLG8nkpHSCA%3D&reserved=0) that is 
essentially designed exactly for this purpose: to illustrate and compare 
all of the specialized morphological and descriptive terms used over the 
historical course of the discipline.

Some of you may be familiar with resources like the Torre-Bueno 
Glossary, and the HAO is effectively the digital "next generation" of 
this type of resource. For those of you who work on Hymenoptera, the HAO 
is a resource well worth browsing, if nothing else, or a deeper dive if 
you write descriptive papers and aren't already familiar with the HAO. 
For those of you who work on other groups, if you have ever given 
thought to having an illustrated compilation of descriptive terms for 
your discipline, you might want to look at the HAO and give some thought 
as to whether you and your colleagues could develop a similar online 
resource yourself. Perhaps the botanists and mycologists have such 
online resources already, and that would be interesting to know about.

Speaking from my own perspective as a museum curator who has to work 
with all sorts of invertebrate taxa, it is remarkable how divergent the 
terminologies can be for the same or similar structures across 
disciplines, and I can see a very clear need and benefit to having as 
many such resources available as possible. This is especially true when 
it comes to the names for genitalic structures, which are often named 
completely differently even when dealing with homologous parts, 
sometimes even by different authors in the same discipline. It's 
challenging enough to need to dissect genitalia to make IDs, worse when 
you have no idea what to call the parts you're looking at.

As a yet-farther aside, one reason I've been thinking about this is that 
just yesterday, I saw a person ask for help on FaceBook in determining 
what the terms "temple" and "gena" meant in a key to beetles, and they 
were told that the gena was the space between the inner margin of the 
eye and the clypeus, at which point the commenting was turned off so no 
one who knew better could offer a different opinion. It would have been 
great if there had been a website they could have been directed to that 
would have shown them how the gena is defined in beetles.

Peace,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     office:951-827-8704
FaceBook: Doug Yanega (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
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