Semantic search architecture for retrieving information in biodiversity repositories

Abstract

The amount of biological data available electronically is increasing at a rapid rate; for instance, over 16.500 specimens are available today in the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) collections. However, this data is not semantically categorized and stored and thus is difficult to search. To tackle this problem, we present a semantic search architecture, implemented using state of the art semantic web tools, and test it on a set of representative data about biodiversity from INPA. This paper describes how the mechanism of mapping is designed so that the semantic search can find information, based on ontologies. We show a series of SPARQL queries and explain how the mapping mechanism works. Our experiments, using a prototype of the proposed architecture, showed that the prototype had better precision and recall then traditional keyword based search engines.