The Index to Organism Names (ION) is an extensive compendium of scientific names of

taxa In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; : taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular name and ...

at all ranks in the field of

zoology Zoology ( , ) is the scientific study of animals. Its studies include the anatomy, structure, embryology, Biological classification, classification, Ethology, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinction, extinct, and ...

, compiled from the

Zoological Record ''The Zoological Record'' (''ZR'') is an electronic index of zoological literature that also serves as the unofficial register of scientific names in zoology. It was started as a print publication in 1864 by the Zoological Society of London, ...

(later supplemented with content from Sherborn's ''Index Animalium'') by its operators as a publicly accessible internet resource. Initially developed by BIOSIS, its ownership then passed to

Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational corporation, multinational content-driven technology Conglomerate (company), conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and maintains its headquarters at 1 ...

and is currently with

Clarivate Analytics Clarivate Plc is a British-American publicly traded analytics company that operates a collection of subscription-based services, in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics; business and market intelligence, and competitive profiling ...

History

ION was initially developed as a freely available, web accessible component of a larger project, "TRITON" (the Taxonomy Resource and Index To Organism Names system) by BIOSIS, the then publishers of the

("ZR") and

Biological Abstracts Biological Abstracts is a database produced by Clarivate Analytics. It includes abstracts from peer-reviewed academic journal articles in the fields of biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, botany, pre-clinical and experimental medicine, pharmac ...

, in approximately 2000. As originally released it covered all animal names (''sensu lato'') reported in Zoological Record since 1978, along with names from some other groups not covered by the Zoological Record contributed by several partner organizations (the latter were subsequently deprecated in the system). Its initially stated aim was to provide basic nomenclatural and hierarchy information, plus ZR volume occurrence counts (reflecting use in the literature) for animal names, to identify the taxonomic group to which an organism belongs, and to link to further information from ZR (or initially, other collaborating organization). By 2006, the BIOSIS products had been purchased by Thomson Scientific, subsequently

, who continued and extended the ION database (example archived search interface here) using the URL www.organismnames.com, where it continues to reside. The Intellectual Property and Science division of Thomson Reuters was subsequently acquired by

who continue to make ION available (as at mid 2019).

Included content

In its initial release, the Index contained content from Zoological Record dating back to 1978, which was subsequently extended to the full span of the Zoological Record commencing in 1864. In 2011, Nigel Robinson of Thomson Reuters described an in-progress upgrade of the database to include an additional >200,000 names from a digitised version of Sherborn's ''Index Animalium'', extending the content of ION back to the commencement of official zoological nomenclature in 1758. As at 2019, the Index contained over 2 million newly published names from 1758 onwards (with a small gap around the period 1850-1864 corresponding to the difference between the end of coverage of ''Index Animalium'' and the commencement of the "Zoological Record"), out of a total complement of over 5 million name instances, each with an associated unique numeric identifier (ION LSID).

References

{{reflist

External links

ION online search interfaceBioNames home page
(R. Page enhanced version of the ION dataset) Zoological nomenclature Taxonomy (biology) Online databases Internet properties established in 2000 Biodiversity databases Biological databases