Knowledge engineering in environmental sciences: application to Systematics of corals of the Mascarene Archipelago

Systematics, the scientific discipline that deals with listing, describing, naming, classifying and identifying living organisms is at a turning point. Expertise is becoming extremely rare. For future biodiversity studies relying on species identification, environmental technicians will only be left with monographic descriptions and collections in museums. With the emergence of knowledge management on the Internet, it is possible to enhance the use of systematician’s expertise, by providing them with collaborative tools to widely manage, share and transmit their knowledge. Knowledge engineering in Systematics means to revise descriptions of specimens and to bring them alive on the web. We have designed an Iterative Knowledge Base System (IKBS) for achieving these goals. It applies the scientific method in biology (conjecture and test) with a natural process of knowledge management: 1/ acquisition of a descriptive model and related descriptions from collection specimens, 2/ processing of this knowledge for classification and identification, 3/ experimentation and validation. The product of such a tool is a collaborative knowledge base of a domain, that can evolve (by updating the knowledge) and be connected to distributed databases (bibliographic, photographic, geographic, taxonomic, etc.) that will yield information on species after the identification process of a new specimen. The IKBS system is presented here as a life science application facilitating the identification of coral specimens of the family Pocilloporidae. keywords : Knowledge Management, Knowledge Base System, Case Base Reasoning, Inductive Learning, Corals Systematics,