Vocabulary for analysis and experimentation on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems

The anaeeThes thesaurus aims at providing a controlled vocabulary for the semantic description of the study of continental ecosystems and their biodiversity. It has been developed within the framework of the AnaEE-France infrastructure through an iterative process combining both top down and bottom up approaches: import of concepts from other thesauri and collection of concepts used in the AnaEE data bases and/or modeling platforms. The thesaurus consists of concepts handled in different main thematic areas:Abiotic (atmosphere, climate, hydrosphere, litosphere, …); Biotic (animals, plants, micro-organisms, biodiversity, …); Chemical compounds; Experimentation and observation (instrument, method, protocol, measurement, quality, infrastructure …); Ecosystems (type, structure, functioning …); Modeling (formalism, platform, type of model, computer language …); Disciplines (disciplinary and scientific fields); Unit (units of the international system, inherited from the OBOE–standards ontology). anaeeThes contains 12 top concepts. It contains nearly 3320 concepts, of which about 1500 are also offered in French. 360 concepts are inherited from the OBOE-standards ontology, while 748 concepts about soils and their characteristics were created using the « Referentiel pedologique 2008 – AFES» and « World reference base for soil resources 2006 – FAO ». Approximately 400 concepts are mapped to Agrovoc and 280 to Gemet thesauri. Approximately 480 concepts have a definition.The hierarchy offers up to 8 depth levels. Although the headings of the first and second levels are now stable, it is still evolving, especially on the issue of translation and mapping/alignment.