InBiodiv-O: An Ontology for Indian Biodiversity Knowledge Management

To present the biodiversity information, a semantic model is required that connects all kinds of data about living creatures and their habitats. The model must be able to encode human knowledge for machines to be understood. Ontology offers the richest machine-interpretable (rather than just machine-processable) and explicit semantics that are being extensively used in the biodiversity domain. Various ontologies are developed for the biodiversity domain however a review of the current landscape shows that these ontologies are not capable to define the Indian biodiversity information though India is one of the megadiverse countries. To semantically analyze the Indian biodiversity information, it is crucial to build an ontology that describes all the essential terms of this domain from the unstructured format of the data available on the web. Since, the curation of the ontologies heavily depends on the domain where these are implemented hence there is no ideal methodology is defined yet to be ready for universal use. The aim of this article is to develop an ontology that semantically encodes all the terms of Indian biodiversity information in all its dimensions based on the proposed methodology. The comprehensive evaluation of the proposed ontology depicts that ontology is well built in the specified domain.