ClassificationBank stores taxon concept information.

The basic unit is a taxon concept ID. Each concept ID is contains a taxonomic authority reference in the form of an Agent and an optional Citation that may provide a version or date reference. A NameBankID is also associated with the conceptID and this ID represents the literal namestring (name and author combination) that constitutes the valid/accepted/current name of the concept.

Taxon concepts can be arranged hierarchically to form taxonomies. A taxon concept is not required to be a component of a taxonomy.

Synonyms are represented according to the precision with which they are recorded in the indexed source. Some taxonomies reference synonyms in the form of a list of names associated with a valid/accepted/current name. In this case, we represent this list as corresponding NameBankIDs. Others extend this basic list to with attributes that qualify the nature of the synonym (pro-parte, mis-identification, etc.). A more verbose synonymy is represented by a list of chresonyms that include both a name and a specimen or citation reference to explicitly circumscribe the taxon concept. An example of such an explicit synonymy is Megaptera novaeangliae (Borowski, 1718) sec Hershkovitz 1966 as represented within TNS.