A Pattern for Representing Scientific Taxonomies

Standard taxonomies that are meant to serve as reference specifications of specific scientific domains are developed through extensive review by scientists and experts. For data integration and interoperability needs within Knowledge Graphs (KGs), these taxonomies must be translated into formal ontologies. In this paper we present an ontology design pattern for modeling a scientific taxonomy as an ontology. The focus of the pattern is to 1) capture temporal dynamics of concepts as taxonomies evolve, 2) model the provenance of concepts to add context and enable governance, 3) assist the translation of taxonomic relations to ontological relations appropriately that will empower their use within KGs, and 4) tag provenance and other metadata information to mappings or alignments of uncertainty between concepts in different ontologies.