Add a term for "strain"

[cmungall]

There has been a request to add "strain" to NCBITaxon:

• Add definition for "strain" obophenotype/ncbitaxon#107

I think the OBO NCBITaxon rendering should utilize URIs from taxrank

• Switch to taxrank for ranks, and decide on the metamodel obophenotype/ncbitaxon#97

Is this in scope for taxrank?

[balhoff]

Sounds good to me. I don't think there is really a group of stakeholders to weigh in.

[hlapp]

Certainly in scope. The one caveat is that it hasn't been actively maintained for a while. However, taxonomic ranks aren't really changing all that much, so it's not obvious what kind of maintenance there could have been that wasn't.

[hlapp]

BTW, what's a little odd to me is that OLS doesn't show any hierarchy.

[balhoff]

BTW, what's a little odd to me is that OLS doesn't show any hierarchy.

I don't think we have defined what the relationship is between ranks. Is_a would not be correct; maybe part_of but I'm not sure if there are exceptions.

[hlapp]

Ah yes, good point. The question is maybe would there be a problem with implying the existence of, say, some family for, say, every genus whether there's some nomenclatural code that defines that family or not.

[balhoff]

We could link them via skos as annotation properties, using e.g. skos:broader.

[hlapp]

We could, but I think that would run the risk of messing with search implementations, which may use skos:broader as a fallback for finding term matches.

[cthoyt]

see #5 for a more comprehensive update to this ontology based on ranks appearing in the NCBI Taxonomy database