The BioKET Biodiversity Data Warehouse: Data and Knowledge Integration and Extraction

Abstract

Abstract. Biodiversity datasets are generally stored in different formats. This makes it difficult for biologists to combine and integrate them to retrieve useful information for the purpose of, for example, efficiently classify specimens. In this paper, we present BioKET, a data warehouse which is a consolidation of heterogeneous data sources stored in different formats. For the time being, the scopus of BioKET is botanical. We had, among others things, to list all the existing botanical ontologies and relate terms in BioKET with terms in these ontologies. We demonstrate the usefulness of such a resource by applying FIST, a combined biclustering and conceptual association rule extraction method on a dataset extracted from BioKET to analyze the risk status of plants endemic to Laos. Besides, BioKET may be interfaced with other resources, like GeoCAT, to provide a powerful analysis tool for biodiversity data.