From Phenotypes to Trees of Life: A Metamodel-Driven Approach for the Integration of Taxonomy Models

Several projects aim at gathering together data concerning life around the world, in order to systematize them and produce a big, unified tree of life. Rather than a static single picture of the living world, this kind of tree: (i) is a result of a dynamic interaction among several models produced by biologists for describing life and expressing how life changes and evolves as time goes by, (ii) is not unique, since there are different competing perspectives describing life (morphology, behavior, ecology, genetics etc.) and different methods of reconstructing evolutionary trees. Our work addresses these problems by proposing a "superimposed metamodel" mechanism, which acts as a modeling skeleton, supporting a unified view and articulation of models/ontologies involved in tasks that start at collecting data from the field towards producing descriptions and evolutionary trees. It enables to externalize specific knowledge as ontologies and to trace the entire rationale from one extreme of the process to the other one. This paper shows practical experiments in which we explore such characteristics as: guiding the expression of evolutionary hypotheses from observational data, going backwards on the provenance path, or evaluating changes of the tree in front of new evidences collected in the field.