Aonde: An ontology Web service for interoperability across biodiversity applications

Biodiversity research requires associating data about living beings and their habitats, constructing sophisticated models and correlating all kinds of information. Data handled are inherently heterogeneous, being provided by distinct (and distributed) research groups, which collect these data using different vocabularies, assumptions. methodologies and goals, and under varying spatio-temporal frames. Ontologies are being adopted as one of the means to alleviate these heterogeneity problems, thus helping cooperation among researchers. While ontology toolkits offer a wide range of operations, they are self-contained and cannot be accessed by external applications. Thus, the many proposals for adopting ontologies to enhance interoperability in application development are either based on the use of ontology servers or of ontology frameworks. The latter support many functions. but impose application recoding whenever ontologies change, whereas the first supports ontology evolution, but for a limited set of functions. This paper presents Aonde-a Web service geared towards the biodiversity domain that combines the advantages of frameworks and servers, supporting ontology sharing and management on the Web. By clearly separating storage concerns from semantic issues, the service provides independence between ontology evolution and the applications that need them. The service provides a wide range of basic operations to create, store, manage, analyze and integrate multiple ontologies. These operations can be repeatedly invoked by client applications to construct more complex manipulations. Aonde has been validated for real biodiversity case studies. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.