Building the "Plant Glossary"-A controlled botanical vocabulary using terms extracted from the Floras of North America and China
Building the "Plant Glossary"-A controlled botanical vocabulary using terms extracted from the Floras of North America and China
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作者：
Endara, Lorena;Cole, Heather A.;Cui, Hong
分类学描述包含有价值的表型数据，这些数据通常不能直接用于现代进化、生态或生物多样性分析。我们描述了一个从植物分类描述中建立基于共识的控制词汇表的过程，该过程也可以应用于其他分类群的控制词汇表的建立。受控词汇表可以用作文本挖掘算法的词汇表、本体候选术语的来源，以及帮助未来的作者更恰当和一致地使用领域词汇表的指南。我们从30卷《北美植物区系》和《中国植物区系》的描述中提取表型描述术语，并将其与《北美植物区系分类术语表》中的术语合并。七个贡献者将术语放入一组类别中，直到每个术语的两个或更多类别之间达成一致。术语分类使术语的含义对术语表的后续用户更加明确。生成的“植物术语表”（术语和术语分类）包含分为53个类别的9228个术语。术语分类方面的差异占分类工作的49%，个别分类之间的许多差异可归因于对术语的个人解释以及植物区系中使用的描述性语言的流动性。在分类术语时遇到的困难使我们能够探索语言的使用可能阻碍分类描述的准确和详细注释的情况。植物术语表是朝着创建和丰富植物表型正式本体论迈出的重要一步，因为通过本练习发现的语义现象是构建本体论的有用背景信息。该术语表已被新软件用于解析和注释植物分类描述，并且有超过6000个新术语可用于创建本体论。
Taxonomic descriptions contain valuable phenotypic data that is often not directly accessible for modern evolutionary, ecological, or biodiversity analyses. We describe a process for building a consensus-based controlled vocabulary from taxonomic descriptions for plants, which also can be applied for building controlled vocabularies for other taxon groups. Controlled vocabularies are useful as lexicons for text mining algorithms, as source of candidate terms for ontologies, and as guides to help future authors use domain vocabulary more appropriately and consistently. We extracted phenotype-describing phrases terms from descriptions of 30 volumes of the Flora of North America and Flora of China and merged these with terms from the Categorical Glossary of the Flora of North America. Seven contributors placed the terms into a set of categories until there was an agreement among two or more categorizations per term. Term categorization makes the meaning of a term more explicit for the subsequent users of the glossary. The resulting "Plant Glossary" (terms and categorization of terms) contains 9228 terms grouped in 53 categories. Differences in term categorization represented 49% of the categorization effort, and the many differences among individual classifications can be attributed to individual interpretation of terms and to the fluid nature of descriptive language used in Floras. The difficulties experienced while classifying the terms allowed us to explore cases where the use of language can hinder the accurate and detailed annotation of taxonomic descriptions. The Plant Glossary represents a significant step towards creating and enriching formal ontologies for plant phenotypes as the semantic phenomena found through this exercise is useful background information for building ontologies. The glossary has been used by new software to parse and annotate plant taxonomic descriptions, and over 6000 new terms are available for creating ontologies.