Meeting report: Identifying practical applications of ontologies for biodiversity informatics

This report describes the outcomes of a recent workshop, building on a series of workshops from the last three years with the goal if integrating genomics and biodiversity research, with a more specific goal here to express terms in Darwin Core and Audubon Core, where class constructs have been historically underspecified, into a Biological Collections Ontology (BCO) framework. For the purposes of this workshop, the BCO provided the context for fully defining classes as well as object and data properties, including domain and range information, for both the Darwin Core and Audubon Core. In addition, the workshop participants reviewed technical specifications and approaches for annotating instance data with BCO terms. Finally, we laid out proposed activities for the next 3 to 18 months to continue this work. Keywords: Ontology, Biodiversity, Population, Community, Darwin core, OWL, RDF, Microbial ecology, Sequencing