Abstract
The domain complexity and structural- and semantic heterogeneity of biodiversity data, as well as idiosyncratic legacy data-creation processes, present significant integration and interoperability challenges. In this paper we describe a case-study of ontology-driven semantic mediation using records of flower-visiting insects from three natural history collections in South Africa. We establish a conceptual domain model for flower-visiting, expressed in an OWL ontology, and use it to semantically enrich the three data-stores. We show how this enrichment allows for the creation of an integrated flower-visiting dataset. We discuss how the ontology captures both implicit and explicit knowledge, and we show how the ontology can be used to identify and analyze high-level flower-visiting behaviour. We propose that a system that employs this ontology for semantic enrichment and semantic mediation may be used to automatically construct flower-visiting and pollination networks, the manually constructed equivalents of which are routinely used by domain scientists to analyze their data.
Keywords
- biodiversity information
- semantic mediation
- ontology
- plant-insect interactions
- pollination
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Coetzer, W., Moodley, D., Gerber, A. (2013). A Case-Study of Ontology-Driven Semantic Mediation of Flower-Visiting Data from Heterogeneous Data-Stores in Three South African Natural History Collections. In: Cimiano, P., Fernández, M., Lopez, V., Schlobach, S., Völker, J. (eds) The Semantic Web: ESWC 2013 Satellite Events. ESWC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7955. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41242-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41242-4_8
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