Aligning insect phylogenies: Perelleschus and other cases

We explore a novel approach for aligning multiple classifications and phylogenies based on the use of taxonomic concepts, Region Connection Calculus (RCC-5) articulations, and Answer Set Programming (ASP) reasoners. The Perelleschus use case of Franz & Cardona-Duque (2013) includes six related taxonomies (ranging from 1936 to 2013), 54 taxonomic concepts, and 75 relevant articulations asserted in that publication. The Euler/X toolkit is used to analyze 13 configurations of six pairwise alignments for this use case under heterogeneous taxonomic constraints and interpretations. The Open Source toolkit ingests two input taxonomies, an initial set of expert-made articulations, and additional taxonomic constraints. The reasoning approach utilizes ASP to iteratively optimize the logical consistency and expressiveness of the input and infer the set of maximally informative relations, leading to visual representations of single or multiple possible world merge taxonomies. We review the challenges for a wider implementation of RCC-5/ASP multi-taxonomy alignments with emphasis on human, computational, and resolution constraints. The focus of concept taxonomy is to build sound provenance chains that are amenable to computational representation and reasoning, irrespective of the historical or future stability of name/circumscription relationships for perceived organismal lineages.