PhyloCommons: Sharing, annotating, and reusing Phylogenies

This document describes PhyloCommons, a project that aims to facilitate the sharing, annotation, and reuse of phylogenetic trees. It notes that while phylogenetic trees are increasingly important for biological research, their reuse remains rare due to barriers like a lack of archival and standardization. PhyloCommons addresses these issues by building a central repository that allows trees to be uploaded, annotated with ontologies, and easily queried to retrieve relevant trees for a given research question. An example use case demonstrates how a researcher could more easily obtain phylogenetic data on bird species through PhyloCommons rather than manual methods. The document encourages readers to try out and contribute to the online PhyloCommons system.