STWO: An Ontology for Soil Food Web Reconstruction

While food webs are pivotal tools to understand the structure, dynamics and functioning of ecosystems, their reconstruction is not trivial since feeding relationships are not always known. To this end, soil ecologists often simplify the problem by either grouping morphologically similar organisms into trophic groups with known interactions or by assuming that feeding relationships are predictable from consumer diets (e.g. frugivore or bacterivore). Interestingly, the scientific community has collected a considerable amount of information on trophic interactions and feeding habits. However, the largescale exploitation of these data for food web reconstruction is hampered by the lack of standards for representing and reasoning upon trophic knowledge. The goal of our work is to propose an ontology that will support the automatic reconstruction of soil food webs from community composition data.