Back-bone ontology for Biodiveristy-informatics

Finnish Museum of Natural History proposes a project for forming a back-bone vocabulary-ontology for ecological and biodiversity data and metadata, with the aim of enhancing data discoverability and interoperability.

In most of the talks here in BIH2013 some ontologies and/or vocabularies are mentioned. Many projects also use ontologies related to fields like agro-forestry, geography and/or molecular biology or even publishing. Yet, vocabularies describing the quality of ecological and/or biodiversity data are mostly constructed of vocabularies from these neighboring domains.

To make data more interoperable and discoverable, back-bone vocabulary-ontology for ecological and biodiversity data and metadata is needed.

A gap analyses, first to discover existing vocabularies and ontologies to find out what is missing, could be the first step. Collaboration in defining the missing parts of this back-bone for describing data quality, for example vocabularies describing data generating methodology and data accuracy, would be the second step.This can be also done in close collaboration with TDWG, but for this funding call the focus would be in European context.

In the European context also legal categories and vocabularies defined for Inspire data should be connected/mapped to this back bone.   

Concrete outcome from this project could be a platform (possibly the one TDWG recommends), that could be customized for defining this back-bone vocabulary and secondly a mapping tool for data managers for mapping local ontologies and/or existing data to this back-bone. '

For the technical outcomes the consortium should make sure that all the parts are interoperable with similar services such as the vocabulary services of the ANDS in Australia, the GBIF ocabularies, and the terminology services to be implemented by GfBIO (the German data center) and other national vocabulary services.