MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4413334435 · doi:10.1186/s12862-025-02425-4

NCBITaxonomy.jl: rapid biological names finding and reconciliation

2025· article· en· W4413334435 on OpenAlex
Timothée Poisot, Rory Gibb, Sadie J. Ryan, Colin J. Carlson

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueBMC Ecology and Evolution · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicGenomics and Phylogenetic Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversité de MontréalUniversité du Québec
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCourtois FoundationInstitut de Valorisation des DonnéesCompute CanadaNational Science Foundation
KeywordsWorkflowComputer scienceStandardizationApproximate string matchingDatabaseInformation retrievalProgramming languageData miningPattern matching

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

NCBITaxonomy.jl is a Julia package designed to address the complex challenges of taxonomic name reconciliation using a local copy of the NCBI taxonomic backbone (Federhen in Nucleic Acids Res 40:D136-D143, 2012, Schoch et al. in Database 2020:baaa062, 2020). The package provides advanced name matching capabilities that handle common issues in taxonomic data, including synonyms, homonyms, vernacular names, nomenclatural changes, and typographical errors. Core functionalities include case-insensitive search, customizable fuzzy string matching, and taxonomically-restricted searches. The package implements a robust exception system that explicitly handles ambiguous matches without interrupting workflow execution, enabling automated processing of large datasets. NCBITaxonomy.jl works with Julia 1.6 and up, uses Apache Arrow format for efficient local storage. It provides lineage navigation and taxonomic distance functions. The package has been successfully deployed in large-scale projects for automated name reconciliation and cleaning, demonstrating its effectiveness for high-throughput name reconciliation across heterogeneous biological datasets. The design prioritizes programmatic access over command-line usage, making it well-suited for integration into bioinformatics pipelines requiring reliable taxonomic standardization.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.046
Threshold uncertainty score0.305

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.020
GPT teacher head0.239
Teacher spread0.218 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it