Jennifer C Girón, Sergei Tarasov, Luis Antonio González Montaña, Nicolas Matentzoglu, Aaron D Smith, Markus Koch, Brendon E Boudinot, Patrice Bouchard, Roger Burks, Lars Vogt, Matthew Yoder, David Osumi-Sutherland, Frank Friedrich, Rolf Beutel, István Mikó
The spectacular radiation of insects has produced a stunning diversity of phenotypes. During the past 250 years, research on insect systematics has generated hundreds of terms for naming and comparing them. In its current form, this terminological diversity is presented in natural language and lacks formalization, which prohibits computer-assisted comparison using semantic web technologies. Here we propose a Model for Describing Cuticular Anatomical Structures (MoDCAS) which incorporates structural properties and positional relationships for standardized, consistent, and reproducible descriptions of arthropod phenotypes...
April 24, 2023: Systematic Biology