Development of Flora-Oriented Plant Ontology

Free text botanical descriptions contained in printed floras can provide a wealth of valuable scientific information. Domain ontology is greatly useful in knowledge acquisition, sharing and analysis. In order to acquire the richness of the information contained in Chinese floras efficaciously, we introduced the flora-oriented plant ontology (FPO) into the process of knowledge acquisition. In view of the botanical description's characteristic in the floras, this paper constructed the domain ontology mainly from the aspect of floristic morphologic description. FPO can reflect the flora domain knowledge hierarchical structure clearly, and can be used for application systems, such as information extraction systems and information retrieval systems.