Authors: Daniel T. Semwayo, Sonia Berman
Tags: 2004, conceptual modeling
The niche concept has been recognised as a fundamental notion in biological and business systems, amongst others. Existing data models do not have adequate primitives that faithfully represent ecological niches for geographical information systems. This paper shows the limitations of the status quo, manifested in semantic heterogeneity and the meaningless integration of ecological data sets. We advocate an ontological engineering approach to ecological data modelling and propose two new data modelling primitives, Functional object granules [FOGs] and Functional Contexts, which can be used to represent niches. We present our data modelling environment, OntoCrucible, and illustrate our model and methodology in the context of a case study involving African smallholder farmer upliftment.Read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-30466-1_4
