About Arachnolingua

Frequently Asked (or should be frequently asked) Questions

What does this do?

This is a database of published descriptions of behavior of spiders and other arachnids (mites, scorpions, etc.) You can enter a taxon name (mostly species) in the taxon search box and see a list of published behaviors for that taxon and links to the publication where they were mentioned.

OK, but what does it really do right now?

Currently there are annotations for several taxa (including Tetragnatha, Deinopis, Cupiennius salei, Leucauge mariana). You can enter a taxon name in the taxon box and if there are behavior annotations for the taxon, they will be listed. If the taxon is in the current taxonomy (a chunk of NCBI) but no behavior is listed, it will return a table with a link to the taxon term - currently this is the entry in OntoBee (not very useful), but this will change to point to the NBCI or alternative taxonomy page. Note that the publication links are now live and point to the publication's doi which will redirect to the publisher's page. Eventually each pub will have it's own generated page both to handle pubs without doi's or other URL's but also to provide information about the publication relative to this database.
There are also a couple of behavior terms that are available in a taxon cross-reference table (try 'posture' or 'predator behavior'). Note that there have been a number of corrections and improvements to site recently. The third form will have cross references for participants (either anatomical parts or components of the environment - prey, substrates, etc.).
Leucauge mariana is the first non-NCBI taxon and is represented by its LSID in the World Spider Catalog

What about the other Arachnids?

There are a couple of mite and scorpion papers in the initial collection. More will be added. The initial taxonomy includes all arachnids listed in NCBI plus additional taxa as needed by curation.

What about common names in the taxon search?

This is under consideration. If you want to see this, voice your support at curation at arachb.org

How about a language other than English?

This site gets a lot of hits from outside the English speaking world. Support for other languages is in the planning stages. If you want to voice support for a particular language, please send it to curation at arachb.org

Can I report a problem with the website?

Technical problems can be reported to admin at arachb.org.

What about a problem or error in the data?

Curation issues, requests, suggestions to curation at arachb.org

OWL source (RDF/XML) for current KB

here
Note: this will dump rdf-xml format direct to your browser so you may want to have a plugin installed for formating all that xml.

Arachnolingua imports terms from these Ontologies

NeuroBehavior Ontology

OBO ontology for behavior

NCBI taxonomy (generated OWL file in OBO foundry)

Taxonomy (only Arachnid taxa and the path to 'root')

Spider Biology Ontology

Mostly anatomy of spiders

Information Artifact Ontology

Vocubulary used for talking about descriptions of behavior

Relations Ontology

Vocabulary of relations among and between entities and processes

Basic Formal Ontology

Root terms for all OBO ontologies

In addition, several other ontologies (ECO, GO, PATO, CHEBI, UBERON, ENVO, PCO) provide terms available to curators.

Development Blog for Arachnolingua

Here