Knowledge Management in Environmental Sciences with $\mathcal{I}\mathcal{K}\mathcal{B}\mathcal{S}:$ : Application to Systematics of Corals of the Mascarene Archipelago

Abstract

Systematics, the scientific discipline that deals with listing, describing, naming, classifying and identifying living organisms is a central point in environmental sciences. Expertise is becoming rare and for future biodiversity studies relying on species identification, environmental technicians will only be left with monographic descriptions and collections in museums.

With the emergence of knowledge management, it is possible to enhance the use of systematician’s expertise, by providing them with collaborative tools to widely manage, share and transmit their knowledge. Knowledge engineering in Systematics means to revise taxa and descriptions of specimens. We have designed an Iterative Knowledge Base System — $\mathcal{I}\mathcal{K}\mathcal{B}\mathcal{S}:$ — for achieving these goals. It applies the scientific method in biology (conjecture and test) with a natural process of knowledge management. The product of such a tool is a collaborative knowledge base of a domain, that can evolve (by updating the knowledge) and be connected to distributed databases (bibliographic, photographic, geographic, taxonomic, etc.) that will yield information on species after the identification process of a new specimen.

This paper presents an overview of the methodology, the methods (identification tree and case-based reasoning) and the validation process used to build knowledge bases in Systematics. An application on corals of the Mascarene Archipelago is given as a case study.