  Microbiology research has access to a very large amount of public information
on the habitats of microorganisms. Many areas of microbiology research uses
this information, primarily in biodiversity studies. However the habitat
information is expressed in unstructured natural language form, which hinders
its exploitation at large-scale. It is very common for similar habitats to be
described by different terms, which makes them hard to compare automatically,
e.g. intestine and gut. The use of a common reference to standardize these
habitat descriptions as claimed by (Ivana et al., 2010) is a necessity. We
propose the ontology called OntoBiotope that we have been developing since
2010. The OntoBiotope ontology is in a formal machine-readable representation
that enables indexing of information as well as conceptualization and
reasoning.
