PHYLOREFERENCING

Phyloreferencing aims to provide a standard mechanism for defining biological clades with precise and fully machine-processible semantics. The name is in analogy to the ubiquitous mechanism of georeferencing, which instead of ambiguous geographic place names uses geographic coordinates to enable powerful computation for geography-linked data... Phyloreferencing uses machine-interpretable definitions of the unique pattern of evolutionary descent that distinguishes a clade from all others. A clade defined in this way can include thousands of species, or can identify a monophyletic subgroup within a species. In contrast to authoritative nomenclatural naming, our goal is to allow users to construct phyloreferences instantly for any group of shared evolutionary descent for which they wish to communicate (or obtain) data... What is phyloreferencing, why does it matter, and who is supporting it.