2. Use Integer Taxonomy Identifiers

Date: 2022-12-23

Status

Accepted

Context

Various taxonomic profilers either use supplied or built-in taxonomies. Most commonly those are either from NCBI or GTDB. In any case, most profilers that we encountered so far use integers to refer to nodes within their taxonomy. This is also the convention for the TaxonKit's taxdump format.

Decision

We will use integer taxonomy identifiers for our internal standard profile. We will use the number zero to denote unclassified reads.

Consequences

All taxonomic profiles need to have their identifiers transformed to integers. There is some variety in how tools denote unclassified reads. Often they are given 0 or -1 as the identifier but some tools also provide no value at all. All of those must be converted to zero. Since pandas cannot handle missing values for integers, we load identifier columns as string first and then convert them later.

Another consequence is that if we ever want to attach names or lineages to our output files, the corresponding taxonomy will have to be loaded separately.