The Semantic Diversity of Biodiversity Semantics: An Overview
Mark Schildhauer 1
        1
            National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, NCEAS, UCSB, Santa Barbara CA


                               Abstract
                               Biodiversity is a relatively recent term, becoming prominent starting in the mid-1980’s as a
                               descriptor for the study of the “diversity of life-forms” on Earth. This charismatic label served
                               to focus concerns on recent alarming trends in the global loss of Biodiversity-- including
                               populations, species, communities, and ecosystems.

                               While coining of the term Biodiversity grew out of concerns over the accelerating
                               disappearance of natural habitats and corresponding extinction of species — more recently its
                               connotations have been much broader, encompassing a number of disciplines dedicated to
                               characterizing, quantifying, conserving and understanding the remarkable variation in Earth’s
                               life forms at various scales, ranging from the molecular to the global. Fundamental to these
                               investigations is the discipline of "Modern Systematics" that focuses specifically on the naming
                               and categorizing of biological, often organismal “types”, according to codes and rules
                               established and maintained by the research community. The resulting “names" provide a
                               unifying, though not entirely uncontested, reference terminology used by researchers in fields
                               such as phylogenetics, evolutionary biology, paleontology, ecology, and conservation
                               biology— to effectively clarify what types of biological entities were studied.

                               There is clearly an opportunity for these names (that can change over time as our understanding
                               changes)— whether of clades, species, other taxonomic ranks, vegetation associations, habitat
                               types, etc.; and the rules governing them — to be expressed in modern semantic languages and
                               frameworks, in order to enable more effective discovery, interpretation, re-use, and exchange
                               of biodiversity resources over the Web. In addition semantic technologies provide
                               opportunities to de-silo and interoperate biodiversity terminologies more effectively with
                               resources from disparate fields, ranging from ecological field data, to taxonomic descriptions,
                               to conservation policy decisions.

                               In this talk I will provide some perspectives on current exciting work building biodiversity-
                               relevant vocabularies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs, that collectively are helping to
                               realize the goal of an interoperable “Biodiversity Semantics”. I will also attempt to identify
                               some opportunities and challenges that remain.
 1

Bibliography
    Dr. Schildhauer was Director of Computing at the U.S. National Center for Ecological Analysis and
Synthesis, NCEAS, from its opening in 1995 until 2017, when he "semi-retired" to focus on research.
His technology research interests are primarily in the areas of environmental informatics, geospatial
semantics, the Semantic Web, Knowledge Graph technologies, and Open Science. In the distant past,
he was technical coordinator of the first major biodiversity assessment of the macrobiota of rocky
intertidal habitats within the Southern California Bight, and later did extensive field work in coral reef
fish communities in the southern Caribbean Sea. At NCEAS, Schildhauer worked closely with plant
biologists designing vegetation classifications for North America, and a functional trait database for

S4BioDiv 2021: 3rd International Workshop on Semantics for Biodiversity, held at JOWO 2021: Episode VII The Bolzano Summer of
Knowledge, September 11-18, 2021, Bolzano, Italy
                            © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
                            Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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New World plants. He also participated in the creation of the formal XML metadata schema, EML
(Ecological Metadata Language; https://eml.ecoinformatics.org/), and its recent extensions to
accommodate semantic annotation. He co-developed the OBOÉ ontology for observations and
measurements, and helped align it with the W3C SSN/SOSA recommendation
( https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-ssn/). Schildhauer's academic training was in marine, population, and
behavioral ecology (PhD, Univ Calif, Santa Barbara); and an undergraduate degree in Biology (A.B.,
Harvard).