NCBITaxonomy.jl: rapid biological names finding and reconciliation

• Published in: BMC ecology and evolution Vol. 25; no. 1; pp. 84 - 5
• Main Authors: Poisot, Timothée, Gibb, Rory, Ryan, Sadie J., Carlson, Colin J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London BioMed Central 20.08.2025; BioMed Central Ltd; BMC
• Subjects: Animal Systematics/Taxonomy/Biogeography; Applications software; Automatic classification; Biology; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Classification - methods; Electronic data processing; Entomology; Evolutionary Biology; Genetics and Population Dynamics; ICTV; Identification and classification; Life Sciences; Methods; NCBI; Phenetics; Software; Taxonomic names; Terminology as Topic; Canada; NCBI; Database; ICTV; Taxonomic names
• ISSN: 2730-7182; 2730-7182
• DOI: 10.1186/s12862-025-02425-4

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.