A strategy for biodiversity knowledge acquisition based on domain ontology

Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recognizes that biodiversity loss must be reduced to promote poverty alleviation and direct benefit of all live on Earth. To achieve that, we must consider robust strategies and action plans based on knowledge and state of art technology. Parallel to that, research is underway in universities and scientific organization aiming to develop semantic web as an additional resource associated to formal ontology and the avoidance of knowledge acquisition problems such as expertise dependence, tacit knowledge, experts' availability and ideal time importance. Ontology can structure knowledge acquisition process for the purpose of comprehensive, portable machine understanding and knowledge extraction on the semantic web environment. These technologies applied to biodiversity domain can be a valuable resource for CBD. The paper presents a strategy for biodiversity knowledge acquisition based on a negotiation protocol which uses domain ontology to extract knowledge from data sources in the semantic web domain. © 2009 IEEE