Ontology supported by CLOSi data schemas in the Semantic Web context

Abstract

The Semantic Web relies heavily on the formal ontology that structure underlying data for the purpose of comprehensive and portable machine understanding. Therefore, the success of the Semantic Web depends strongly on the proliferation of ontology, which requires fast and easy ontology engineering and the avoidance of critical knowledge acquisition problems. The Gartner Group, the market research company, identified ontology as one of the top 10 technologies forecasted for 2005. Parallel to that, there are a growing amount of available biodiversity data that are stored in online repositories and constitute the base for decision-making process aiming conservation and sustainability. This paper presents the use of the Clustered Object Schema for INPA's Biodiversity Data Collections (CLOSi) to support ontology descriptions, aiming to improve the process of semantic data extraction in the Web.