Active Animals initiative
Welcome to Active Animals. If you’re interested in classifying animal behaviour, then make yourself at home.
Behaviour Ontology (ACTAN)
On the following pages, you can find an INTRODUCTION to the ontology (a kind of uber-glossary). Its SCOPING page reflects on the need for an ontology and its potted history.
The ontology itself hosts a plethora of labels, synonyms, definitions, and other provenance or explanatory information. The Alpha-3 version is hosted at WebProtégé and is open for viewing after registering your username. (We have provided some notes here on using WebProtégé.)
The latest version of it is searchable, and its internal hierarchy and connections viewed, at Bioportal.
If you’re keen on collaborating to develop the technology processes for it, to curate its content, you wish to stress-test the ontology’s labels against your observations, or to support its public facies such as this website or at Bioportal, take a look at the INTRODUCTION section: Can I contribute?
Behaviour Labels
Most users will not come here to look at the detailed ontology though. They will want to skim through a more simple catalogue for labels to apply to behaviours they have observed and recorded, perhaps as photos, videos, or recordings. See the full CHECKLIST of ACTAN behaviours for quick reference.
Observation Repositories
iNaturalist
The Active Animals (AA) project at iNaturalist is a way for animal behavioural records to be aggregated systematically there. Still in its Alpha phase, it can be viewed by anyone, but new membership is limited to stress-testers.
Discussion forum
We have a forum to talk to each other about what is happening within ACTAN. You are free to start or join conversations there, but will need to register with GitHub and then follow Active-Animals there.
We are currently in the Alpha phase, so some aspects of the initiative are under construction and have limited functionality or access.
We operate with a CC0 1.0 No Copyright licence.