Active Animals Ontology (ACTAN)

Official site and user guidance

Active Animals Ontology (ACTAN)

Welcome! We’re all about classifying animal behaviour and cataloguing observations.

CHECKLIST

Here you can find ACTAN’s latest, complete list of 901 animal behaviours.

Ordering

This catalogue is drawn from the most superficial data level of ACTAN’s underlying ontology. This a cheat-sheet to its structure. Its classes (parents) and sub-classes (children) are grouped and nested by number ID order, not text label. This is because an ID represents a concept which will barely change, whereas the concept’s label may be amended.

Searching

You can search with your browser’s ‘Find in page’ function. Certain higher level classes are not really helpful for annotating your observations, being pragmatic category aggregating devices (e.g. ‘maintenance context’). Try to find the most peripheral sub-class you can (e.g. ‘ambush hunt’). Remember that there is much more detail, including synonyms which you can search for, back in the main ontology.

Labels

Labels are genonymic binomials: each child class has its own first name and its parent’s first name as its own second name (with a handful of minor divergences, mostly associated with hyphens). This makes it possible to quickly write the parentage for any class (e.g. ambush hunt forage feed maintenance context behaviour). It means that most classes can be distinguished by label from classes which would otherwise be homonyms. (It’s common in the behaviour literature to find the same label used elsewhere with a different meanings.) It is also reminiscent of simple binomial taxonomic labelling (Genus species). But it is cladistic in its ability to dispense with arbitrary intermediary branches while still retaining a hierarchical depiction.

The frequent use of gerunds alongside nouns, some of which can themselves be used as noun-adjuncts, can make it look like a binomial label functions like an adjective and a noun. This is an easy mistake to make, and can help explain some otherwise awkward-looking binomens. Both parts of the label should actually be read as nouns (except for some rare cases). An easy mental work around is to add the modifier ‘-type’ after the first word (e.g. ‘hunt-type forage’ if ‘hunt forage’ feels odd).

Behaviours

Much is no doubt missing from the list below. If you want to collaborate to improve it, you’d be welcome. Check out the section in the INTRODUCTION called: Can I contribute?

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