HANCESTRO release v2025-02-24

This HANCESTRO release includes the following items:

• Replaced deprecated COB:0000032 (geographic location) with GAZ:00000448 (geographic location).
• Added "(1KGP)" suffix to the label for all reference populations from the 1000 Genomes project, and "(GGVP)" to populations from the Gambian Genome Variation Project.
• Added "ancestry" suffix to certain ancestry groups such as "Asian" or "European" in order to differentiate from the new equivalent geography descriptor classes created for the purpose of self-reported ethnicity annotation.
• Added 23 new classes including new geography-based and ethnicity descriptors, as well as several new population descriptors in the general ancestry hierarchy.
• Added synonyms and definitions to a range of existing terms.

Full release diff in the repo.

HANCESTRO release v2024-08-19

This HANCESTRO release focuses primarily on the inclusion of reference populations such as those from the 1000 Genomes Project and the Human Genome Diversity Project. All reference populations are grouped under the parent reference population (HANCESTRO:0632). There are a total of 212 reference populations included in HANCESTRO. Additional documentation on the inclusion of reference populations can be found on the HANCESTRO wiki.

In addition to the reference populations, this release contains a number of fixes to issues that arose from the previous release, such as duplicate populations between the AfPO import and HANCESTRO, and a number of typos.

HANCESTRO release v2024-06-21

This release of HANCESTRO contains a wide range of updates, including:

• AfPO import: As of release v2023-06-21, HANCESTRO defers to the African Population Ontology (AfPO), produced as part of the H3ABioNet project, on all terminology relating to African populations. We import all population terms created by AfPO and include them in our hierarchy underneath our continental ancestry term African (HANCESTRO:0010). Existing HANCESTRO terms such as Masaai (HANCESTRO:0593) or Somali (HANCESTRO:0518) have been deprecated in favour of their AfPO equivalents. AfPO terms can easily be identified by their AfPO identifiers (AfPO:0000000 or http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/AfPO_0000000). For any queries, concerns, bug reports, change or new term requests about African populations, please raise an issue on the AfPO Github Tracker directly.

• Renamed geographic category (HANCESTRO:0602) to geography-based population category to reduce confusion between this term and our geographic hierarchy (countries, regions and continents) under geographic location (COB:0000032)

• Extended classification of ethnicity category and geography-based population category (fixes #46 )

• Renamed Hispanic or Latin American (HANCESTRO:0014) to Latin or Admixed American and reclassified several population descriptors from undefined ancestry population (HANCESTRO:0566) to Latin or Admixed American. These changes were incorporated following feedback from collaborators in CZI's Single Cell Biology Programs who are experts in South and Indigenous American populations.

• Added Hispanic (HANCESTRO:0612) in line with the work on Latin and Indigenous American populations. Hispanic is the only term in HANCESTRO that is an asserted subclass of ethnicity category and is not included at all in the ancestry category hierarchy.

• Renamed Native American (HANCESTRO:0013) to Indigenous American, and added separate sub-classes for Indigenous in North America (HANCESTRO:0610) and Indigenous in South America (HANCESTRO:0611) with a number of indigenous populations in each category. Again, these changes were made based on feedback from our expert collaborators.

• Moved from HERMIT to ELK as our ontology reasoner: following the incorporation of the AfPO import into the ontology, reasoning with HERMIT was no longer scalable, so we made the pragmatic decision to use ELK as our reasoner of choice. Unfortunately, HANCESTRO uses several statements that are outside the scope of the OWL2-EL profile covered by ELK, such as the use of only (ObjectAllValuesFrom) constructs.
  The part of HANCESTRO most affected by this was the inference of the genetically isolated population (HANCESTRO:0290) hierarchy. In order to ensure consistency in HANCESTRO's classification, we adjusted the relevant axioms to conform to OWL2-EL.
  HANCESTRO still contains a range of axioms not supported by OWL2-EL, but these are mostly confined to the geographic location hierarchy, which is due to undergo review later this year.

HANCESTRO release v2024-04-25

This release contains updates to the HANCESTRO representation of ethnicity. It includes 2 new classes that live alongside the old ancestry category:

• ethnicity category (HANCESTRO:0601)
• geographic category (HANCESTRO:0602)

The geographic category is a convenience class that groups all ancestry-related descriptors that pertain specifically to geographic regions. The ethnicity category is also a convenience class, grouping any descriptors related to religious, cultural, tribal or other social concepts. This latter category is still a work in progress and we would welcome feedback and input in this area.

In order to correctly represent geographic descriptors, we also modified the ancestry hierarchy in terms of the relationships between larger ancestry groups related to geography, and non-geographic subgroups. These are now related via axioms other than direct parent-child relationships. For example, we no longer assert that Han Chinese is_a Chinese. This has been changed to Han Chinese partially_overlaps_with some Chinese.

HANCESTRO release v2024-02-07

Minor release to accommodate alignment with AfPO.

Change log:

• Deprecated dbpedia:Middle_Africa in favour of dbpedia:Central_Africa
• Deprecated dbpedia:Swaziland in favour of dbpedia:Eswatini
• Changed the located in axioms of several countries in line with AfPO country/region assertions:

Country	old region	new region
South Sudan	Northern Africa	Eastern Africa
Sudan	Northern Africa	Eastern Africa
Zambia	Eastern Africa	Central Africa
Mauritania	Western Africa	Northern Africa

HANCESTRO release v2024-01-24

This release includes a full restructure of the geographical entities in HANCESTRO. Changes include:

• migration of geographical entities from material entity to immaterial entity
• grouping of countries, regions and continents under the COB term geographical location (COB:0000032)
• replacement of continent (GEO:000000374) with continent (GAZ:00000013)
• replacement of country (HANCESTRO:0003) with Country (NCIT:C25464)
• obsoletion of all HANCESTRO native regions and continents in favour of their equivalent DBPEDIA IRIs (except for Australia/New Zealand (HANCESTRO:0051) which has no equivalent DBPEDIA term)
• existing annotation properties and class axioms were preserved and migrated wherever possible.

Full list of obsoleted classes:

Label	HANCESTRO ID	Replacement ID
country	HANCESTRO:0003	NCIT:C25464
Africa	HANCESTRO:0029	dbpedia:Africa
Asia	HANCESTRO:0030	dbpedia:Asia
Caribbean	HANCESTRO:0048	dbpedia:Caribbean
Europe	HANCESTRO:0031	dbpedia:Europe
Melanesia	HANCESTRO:0052	dbpedia:Melanesia
Micronesia	HANCESTRO:0053	dbpedia:Micronesia
Micronesia	HANCESTRO:0032	dbpedia:Oceania
Polynesia	HANCESTRO:0054	dbpedia:Polynesia
Scandinavia	HANCESTRO:0288	dbpedia:Scandinavia
South America	HANCESTRO:0049	dbpedia:SouthAmerica
Eastern Africa	HANCESTRO:0035	dbpedia:Eastern_Africa
Middle Africa	HANCESTRO:0036	dbpedia:Middle_Africa
Northern Africa	HANCESTRO:0037	dbpedia:Northern_Africa
Southern Africa	HANCESTRO:0038	dbpedia:Southern_Africa
Western Africa	HANCESTRO:0039	dbpedia:Western_Africa
Western Asia	HANCESTRO:0043	dbpedia:Western_Asia
Eastern Europe	HANCESTRO:0044	dbpedia:Eastern_Europe
Northern Europe	HANCESTRO:0045	dbpedia:Northern_Europe
Southern Europe	HANCESTRO:0046	dbpedia:Southern_Europe
Western Europe	HANCESTRO:0047	dbpedia:Western_Europe
Central America	HANCESTRO:0050	dbpedia:Central_America
Eastern Asia	HANCESTRO:0055	dbpedia:Eastern_Asia
South Asia	HANCESTRO:0289	dbpedia:South_Asia
Latin America and the Caribbean	HANCESTRO:0033	dbpedia:Latin_America_and_the_Caribbean
Northern America	HANCESTRO:0034	dbpedia:Northern_America
South Central Asia	HANCESTRO:0041	dbpedia:South-central_Asia
South Eastern Asia	HANCESTRO:0042	dbpedia:South-Eastern_Asia

HANCESTRO release v2023-10-13

Infrastructure release with some repo clean-up and migration from semantic versioning to ODK's preferred date-based versioning. No changes to the ontology content.

HANCESTRO release 3.0

Class Count: 612

• Updated the HANCESTRO repo to the latest version of the ODK
• Changed release artefacts:
  • hancestro.owl > hancestro-base.owl
  • hancestro_bfo.owl > hancestro.owl (and hancestro-full.owl)
  • hancestro_inferred.owl > retired
• Changed ontology repo name from ancestro to hancestro
• Changed primary branch name from master to main
• Changed label for HANCESTRO:0015 from Greater Middle Eastern (Middle Eastern, North African or Persian) to Greater Middle Eastern (Middle Eastern or North African or Persian)(as per #36)

Due to changes in the build process, a number of new classes are visible at the root level of the full version. These classes are the result of import artefacts (mostly from the RO import) and are not relevant to the content of HANCESTRO. They can safely be ignored.

HANCESTRO release 2.8

Minor release including the replacement of the label for HANCESTRO:0595 with "Inuit" as per #32 and deprecation of property hasEthnicPopulation as it isn't used (as per #33)

HANCESTRO release 2.7

Minor release including NTRs from #26, reclassification from #25 and typo fix requested as per #21.