# Enabling Biodiversity-Informed Architecture Through Ontology-Driven Data Integration
## 4 Ontology Design and Development
### Alignment with Existing Standards  
To ensure full compliance with FAIR principles, the ontology was designed to be highly interoperable, reusable, and findable by being aligned with well-established standards and vocabularies. This alignment enables seamless integration with external datasets, facilitates data interoperability, and enhances the ontology's applicability across diverse domains. Specifically, the ontology incorporates the following: \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l} \hline
**Prefix** & **Namespace IRI** \\ \hline xsd & [[http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema](http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema)]([http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema](http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema))\# \\ \hline networks-schema & [[https://schema.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network](https://schema.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network)]([https://schema.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network](https://schema.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network))\# \\ networks-inst & [[https://resource.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network/](https://resource.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network/)]([https://resource.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network/](https://resource.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network/)) \\ networks-taxo & [[https://taxonomy.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network/](https://taxonomy.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network/)]([https://taxonomy.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network/](https://taxonomy.dap.tuvien.ac.at/network/)) \\ ecolopes-inst & [[https://resource.ecolopes.org/](https://resource.ecolopes.org/)]([https://resource.ecolopes.org/](https://resource.ecolopes.org/)) \\ ecolopes-schema & [[https://schema.ecolopes.org](https://schema.ecolopes.org)]([https://schema.ecolopes.org](https://schema.ecolopes.org))\# \\ \hline ofn & [[http://www.ontotext.com/sparql/functions/](http://www.ontotext.com/sparql/functions/)]([http://www.ontotext.com/sparql/functions/](http://www.ontotext.com/sparql/functions/)) \\ \hline obo-ro & [[http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/](http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/)]([http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/](http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/)) \\ geo & [[http://www.opengis.net/ont/geosparql](http://www.opengis.net/ont/geosparql)]([http://www.opengis.net/ont/geosparql](http://www.opengis.net/ont/geosparql))\# \\ dwc & [[http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/](http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/)]([http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/](http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/)) \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Prefixes and their namespace IRIs used for entity representation and CRUD operations. * GeoSPARQL: Used to represent geographical data and enable spatial reasoning and geospatial queries across datasets. * Darwin Core: Integrated for biodiversity data representation, ensuring compatibility with life sciences repositories such as GBIF. * OBO Relations: Employed for modelling ecological relationships, such as predator-prey interactions, ensuring consistency with existing biological ontologies. To maintain semantic consistency and interoperability, OBO Relations were aligned using owl:equivalentProperty, allowing for seamless integration with external data sources like GLoBI while preserving existing structures without additional data transformation (cf. Figure 4). This approach follows Linked Open Data (LOD) best practices, ensuring that the ontology extends and interacts meaningfully with established ontologies. On the other hand, the mapping of instance GLoBI data was carried out using Ontotext Refine mappings. In conjunction with the owl:equivalentProperty alignments presented above, the reasoning would infer triples with the OBO Relations predicates, hence enabling interoperability. Regarding geospatial data, the ontology aligns with GeoSPARQL ontology to ensure full compatibility with spatial datasets (e.g., GBIF or shapefiles, cf. Table 2, Dataset No. 2 and 3). Shapefiles were translated to RDF, complying with GeoSPARQL vocabulary by using RML mappings generated by GeoTriples (ver. 1.1.6) [42]. Likewise, latitude and longitude coordinates stemming from GBIF in RDF format were transformed into GeoSPARQL representations via a SPARQL update query, and the result is demonstrated in the following example. **Example 1**.