Knowledge engineering for a database between botany and art.

Abstract

We present the knowledge organisation of a database, which aims to collect information for the project "Plants in European Masterpieces". This project is financed by the European Union within the Culture 2000 program. The project is aimed to link art with plants within the frame of a common European history and to make it accessible to a wide public. The informatics aspect of this project is focused on the creation of a data base which collects detailed information on selected plants and masterpieces in which these plants are presented. The main efforts in the design phase have been devoted to knowledge organisation in order to retain the taxonomic structure of the botanical knowledge, and to minimise data structure redundancies by linking some features which can be applied to the plants at different levels of their taxonomy to the correct level without repeating it. At present the database is installed in the Pc of all the experts that in the 5 involved countries collaborate to collect data for this project. This data is weekly merged in a central database, using a specific automatic procedure that avoids possible duplications of data inserted and checks for possible inconsistencies among data inserted in different temporal databases. The multi-language and easy to use features of this data base make it an interesting prototype for the spreading of scientific information to common public