Supporting knowledge discovery for biodiversity

A proposal for text mining as a support for knowledge discovery on biological descriptions is introduced. Our aim is both to sustain the curation of databases and to offer an alternative representation frame for accessing information in the biodiversity domain. We work on raw texts with minimum human intervention, applying natural language processing to integrate linguistic and domain knowledge in a mathematical model that makes it possible to capture concepts and relationships between them in a computable form, using conceptual graphs. This provides a reasoning basis for determining semantic disjointedness or subsumption, as well as sub and super-concept relationships.