A framework to process complex biodiversity queries

Tackling biodiversity information is essentially a distributed effort. Data handled are inherently heterogeneous, being provided by distinct research groups and using different vocabularies. Queries in biodiversity systems require to correlate these data, using many kinds of knowledge on geographic, biologic and ecological issues. Available biodiversity systems can only cope with part of these queries, and end users must perform several manual tasks to derive the desired correlations, because of semantic mismatches among data sources and lack of appropriate operators. This paper presents a solution based on Web services to meet these challenges. It relies on ontologies to retrieve the query contexts and uses the terms of this context to discover suitable sources in data repositories. This approach is being tested using real data, with new services.