The misleading use of the terms parent, child, ancestor and descendant in databases dealing with biological evolution and taxonomy

Abstract

The rapid burst of electronic databases in the recent decades has led to a boom in specialised terminology meant to describe the structure and way of functioning of these databases. Some of this terminology was borrowed from “common language” vocabulary but used in a specialized technical language. This decision to use existing terms in a new sense, rather than coining new terms for the new concepts, was a questionable one as in some cases this terminology may be misleading, at least in certain contexts. This is the case, in our opinion, with the use of terms expressing genealogical relationships to express hierarchical taxonomic relationships in databases.