Modeling Issues and Solutions: Building a Taxonomy from a Biology Textbook

Our task is to create a taxonomy from an AP Biology textbook’s glossary terms [1] for Project Halo [2]. Project Halo’s goal is to build a reasoning system capable of answering novel questions and solving advanced problems in a broad range of scientific disciplines. In support of this goal, the resulting taxonomy is to be used as a foundation for translating passages within the biology textbook into logical formulas on which a reasoning system will operate. In order to bootstrap our task, we imported ~2400 glossary terms and definition strings from the textbook’s electronic glossary into Collaborative Protégé in OWL format, as classes and comment strings. Our team consisted of biologists and KR specialists. We took an iterative approach, where the biologists of our team attempted initial classifications, restricted to the subclass-of relation, and were encouraged to add additional classes when they deemed it appropriate. As they proceeded, modeling issues were identified and discussed during workgroup sessions. The issues and the solutions that were implemented are as follows.