ThesauForm—Traits: A web based collaborative tool to develop a thesaurus for plant functional diversity research

Research on the various components of biodiversity has and will produce large quantities of heterogeneous and distributed data that need to be integrated and characterized in a unified way to reveal their full potential. Over the last thirty years the trait-based, functional approach to biodiversity has undergone an extraordinary expansion and has been key to advances in many fields of natural science. To represent, exploit and share the tremendous amount of data the biodiversity community has to acquire data standards, which should reflect the perception of this community. A first step toward this goal is to define the set of concepts that form the basis of this particular domain of knowledge, thereby developing a thesaurus for plant functional diversity research. Such concepts can be represented by a controlled list of preferred terms that are identified by the thesaurus' developers. Such a thesaurus will serve as a stable reference of standards for integration purposes, specifically when published in RDF language, a Semantic Web standard, and in addition available as linked data on the web. Here we present Thesauform—Traits, a web based tool dedicated to the collaborative construction of a thesaurus by experts in the field of plant functional diversity research. Thesauform—Traits fully exploits the key principle of the semantic web to facilitate both the thesaurus construction with SKOS and the interaction with Dublin Core and FOAF. It has been successfully used by a group of 15 experts to annotate and validate a set of definitions for more than 150 plant traits. ThesauFom—Traits will be made available as an open source product and will allow scientific communities of all fields to develop thesauri for their specific domain.

► A trait-based approach to biodiversity has gained strong momentum in recent years.
► Terminological standards need to be developed for a trait-based approach to diversity.
► The process and tool developed to produce a thesaurus of plant traits are presented.
► Fifteen plant ecologists have worked with the tool to produce a prototype thesaurus.
► Semantic web principles have proven efficient for this process of co-construction.