Corresponding author: Visotheary Ung (
Academic editor:
Climate change, habitat destruction, and myriad other ecological stressors will impact us all and have already contributed to what is being labeled the sixth wave of extinction (
Thus, we propose that the application of ontological techniques to the ambiguities in protected area semantics is a timely contribution to conservation informatics. We hold that coherent semantic representation of the biogeographic areas which overlap protected areas (often designated empirically) will provide more efficient and standardized informatics, supporting research and decision-making processes. Our approach draws from comparative biogeography, which seeks to classify biogeographic areas based on their natural properties in a process known as bioregionalisation. In particular, we convert a cladogram of biogeographic areas (similar to cladogram of taxa) into a series of ontological classes, each corresponding to a monophyletic clade of areas. In this model, areas of endemism are treated as formal objects related by hierarchical relationships and constrained by the monophyly condition (
We use semantic web standards (RDF and OWL) expressed through interoperable
Visotheary Ung
Biodiversity_Next 2019
PLB is funded by the HGF Infrastructure Programme FRAM of the Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung