Sites:WWW/Tools/INBIO/page

The Invasion Biology Ontology (INBIO) developed in the INAS project (Algergawy et al. 2022) is an ontology for our initial invasion hypothesis network, which summarises the results of the book “Invasion biology: Hypotheses and evidence” (Jeschke & Heger 2018). An ontology can be thought of as a machine-readable encyclopaedia, containing the terms and concepts relevant for a specific field, plus their definitions and connections. The aim of INBIO’s first version is to cover those terms and concepts that are relevant in the context of ten major hypotheses in invasion biology included in the small hypothesis network (Algergawy et al. 2020). To create it, we used expert opinion to identify core terms in each of the ten hypotheses. For the Biotic Resistance Hypothesis, as an example, these terms were “ecosystem”, “biodiversity” and “species”. Next, we searched for existing ontologies containing these terms; where this was successful, we used a fusion/merge strategy to integrate respective modules into the INBIO (Algergawy et al. 2020). In further steps, more concepts were added with the aim to provide full conceptual models of the subjects and objects of the ten hypotheses. We plan to expand the INBIO, so that a future version will cover a larger part of the field of invasion biology.