Ecolingua: a Formal ontology for data in ecology

Abstract

Ecolingua is an ontology for ecological quantitative data, which has been designed through reuse of a conceptualisation of quantities and their physical dimensions provided by theEngMath family of ontologies. A hierarchy of ecological quantity classes is presented together with their definition axioms in first-order logic. An implementation-level application of the ontology is discussed, by way of which conceptual ecological models are synthesised from data annotations inEcolingua through reuse of existing model structures.