Modeling an Ontology for Amazonian Biodiversity

Biodiversity information is essential for supporting environmental studies leading to conservation and sustainable development. It presents a high degree of complexity which includes: spatiotemporal parameters, undefined structure, multidimensionality, a not well-known or agreed vocabulary, large volume and dynamic evolution. To produce results of positive impact for biodiversity, automatic tools and models must interoperate. Due to the variety of data format and predictive models available, to achieve effective interoperability is challenging. To cope with such demand, semantic web and ontology has proved to present the necessary resources for data integration and interoperability. Particularly, ontology can drive knowledge acquisition processes for the purpose of comprehensive, portable machine understanding and knowledge management. This work presents domain ontology technique, developed with INPA’s biological data and information as object of study, which was adopted to support biodiversity monitoring systems in Amazonia.