A Case-Study of Ontology-Driven Semantic Mediation of Flower-Visiting Data from Heterogeneous Data-Stores in Three South African Natural History Collections

The domain complexity and structural- and semantic heterogeneity of biodiversity data, as well as idiosyncratic legacy data-creation processes, present significant integration and interoperability challenges. In this paper we describe a case-study of ontology-driven semantic mediation using records of flower-visiting insects from three natural history collections in South Africa. We establish a conceptual domain model for flower-visiting, expressed in an OWL ontology, and use it to semantically enrich the three data-stores. We show how this enrichment allows for the creation of an integrated flower-visiting dataset. We discuss how the ontology captures both implicit and explicit knowledge, and we show how the ontology can be used to identify and analyze high-level flower-visiting behaviour. We propose that a system that employs this ontology for semantic enrichment and semantic mediation may be used to automatically construct flower-visiting and pollination networks, the manually constructed equivalents of which are routinely used by domain scientists to analyze their data.