Repository for the caste ontology development.
Our knowledge of the processes related to the expression of distinct phenotypes and diferential roles performed by social insects has significantly increased in the past few years. The Caste Ontology seeks to provide a stable, logically defined basis for scientists to refer to castes concepts.
The Caste Ontology consists primarily of two types of data. Classes classify instances of names (things like "worker") and Object Properties define relationships between those instances.
Not yet. We are starting to gather all the data needed for developing the ontology. This is an important step in order to properly determine the dependencies of the subsequent implementations. Hence, this repo will receive a lot of commits before a stable version can be considered ready for use.
CATO is an OWL ontology, meaning that it can be read in ontology editors and knowledge management systems, such as Protégé. We hope to have it picked up by services such as ONTOBEE and Bioportal.
Since CATO is currently in development, there are no classes annotated in the .owl file. However, the logical basis for the ontology and some caste concepts can be obtained at Silva, T. S. R., & Feitosa, R. M. (2018). On titles and royalty: a terminological discussion over castes in myrmecology. Insectes Sociaux, 1-11.
CATO is intended to be a community resource. We welcome all aspects of its development, from assisting in its curation to helping to apply it practically. The most straightforwad mechanism for asking questions, reporting problems, or requesting additions to the ontology is the issue tracker. Alternately there is a listserv.
This ontology repository was created using the ontology starter kit.