ArticleGigaScience2026
Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API.
Article in GigaScience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
- Update of
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is responsible for developing and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy. As the reference framework for organizing the viral world, it is essential for virology and related fields. Despite its widespread use in research and public health, programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has remained limited, posing challenges for integration, versioning, and interoperability across databases and bioinformatics resources requiring up-to-date virus taxonomy.
findingsTo address this, we developed a public and sustainable solution leveraging ontology-based APIs. All available ICTV Master Species List (MSL) releases, from MSL1 to MSL41, were transformed into a unified, semantically structured ontology comprising more than 195,000 current and historical entities and deployed through the Ontology Lookup Service. The ontology is automatically rebuilt and republished whenever a new MSL release becomes available. Complementary ICTV-NCBI mappings and helper libraries support integration into downstream systems.
conclusionsTogether, these resources enable, for the first time, public programmatic retrieval of current and historical ICTV taxon names, taxonomic relationships, metadata, and persistent identifiers through stable endpoints, including resolution of former taxonomic terms to their current accepted taxon or taxa and retrieval of taxon histories across releases. More broadly, this work illustrates a general strategy for transforming structured biological datasets into semantically enriched graph resources exposed through scalable public APIs. These developments enhance interoperability, reduce manual curation, and support Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)-aligned taxonomic data management in virology and pandemic preparedness.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.