Building an Ontology of Flora of Thailand for Developing Semantic Electronic Dictionary

Thailand is one of the tropical countries teeming with diverse flora and vegetation. The diverse vascular plants of Thailand with estimated number of no less than 10,000 species, have been recorded and published in continuation in the Flora of Thailand since 1970. Domain ontologies express conceptualization that are specific for particular domain and greatly useful in knowledge acquisition, sharing and analysis. In this paper, we propose a Thailand’s Flora Ontology (TFO) for developing semantic dictionary on the web to discover the flora knowledge for plant biologists across all disciplines of botany. A mixed methods was applied in organizing of the specification of conceptualizations on flora of Thailand using the domain analytic approach in order for developing an ontology. The TFO has been constructed by using HOZO ontology editor. The research methods included 1) Domain analysis for knowledge organization. 2) Ontology development. The results of classification of Thailand’s Flora based on concise encyclopedia of plants in Thailand, floral characteristics and area of distribution can be divided into 8 concepts including Plant_Information, Plant_Family, Plant_Genus, Plant_Habitat, Botany_Habit, Uses, Medicinal_Properties, and Floristic_Regions. In the next step, semantic electronic dictionary will be developed by using the TFO from this study.