Ontological explication of ecological knowledge for conservation planning of desert ecosystems

Ecological data combined with the applied knowledge of the ecosystem modeling are the building blocks of policy making and planning efforts for the conservation of ecosystems. The ecological modeling is considered in this paper as the process of transforming ecological data and information (produced through empirical investigations and scientific observations) into a level of general knowledge. This capable of representing and forecasting the key patterns, processes and functioning of ecosystems. Within the past decade, the use of ontologies for explicit specification of conceptualizations within the knowledge systems has been widely adopted and employed by many research communities in the domains of biology and life science to enable automated reasoning using the semantically annotated data models. This paper presents and introduces application of knowledge is semantic annotation and ontologies to elucidate the knowledge of desert ecosystems within the domain of conservation planning in Iran.