Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API.

Programmatic access to over 195,000 virus taxonomy entities through a public ontology API enhances interoperability and data management in virology.

• Why it matters: Limited programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has hindered integration, versioning, and interoperability across bioinformatics resources, impacting research and public health efforts.
• What they did: The team transformed all ICTV Master Species List releases into a unified, semantically structured ontology, automatically updated with each new release, and supported by helper libraries and mappings.
• The result: This enables public retrieval of current and historical virus taxon data, improves data consistency, and offers a scalable approach for managing structured biological datasets in virology.