International Committee of Taxonomy of Virus

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is the body that authorizes and organizes the taxonomic classification of viruses. He has developed a universal classification scheme in order to describe all existing viruses. The committee is headed by the virology division of the International Union of Microbiological Societies.

The ICTV seeks to achieve a universal classification that can function as the standard that regulates the formal description of the new strains and the ordering of their location within the classification scheme. It works so that the rules of nomenclature and classification are as close as possible to the traditional standard of the classification of organisms, using some of its categories, suffixes that indicate the taxonomic range and applying cursive letter to the names of the taxa. Recently the ICTV has modified its definitions of viral species, it has interrupted its work in the elaboration of a database with the description of the virus, considering that the era of the exploration in viral taxonomy came to an end. In the opinion of some authors, ICTV should also promote the use of a public database, such as Wikipedia, replacing the original ICTV database as a repository for the primary metadata of individual viruses, and should publish summaries of its reports in that database, for that information to be freely accessible.

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