Applying a biomedical top-level ontology to encode biological taxa.

Classifying biological entities in terms of species and taxa is an important endeavor in biology. But even though many statements within current biomedical ontologies are indeed taxon-dependent, no standard way exists to properly introduce taxon or species information into current ontological architectures. Therefore we discuss various practices to represent such information by applying a biomedical top-level ontology combined with other standard approaches like description logics or the OBO Foundry.