  To present the biodiversity information, a semantic model is required that
connects all kinds of data about living creatures and their habitats. The model
must be able to encode human knowledge for machines to be understood. Ontology
offers the richest machine-interpretable (rather than just machine-processable)
and explicit semantics that are being extensively used in the biodiversity
domain. Various ontologies are developed for the biodiversity domain however a
review of the current landscape shows that these ontologies are not capable to
define the Indian biodiversity information though India is one of the
megadiverse countries. To semantically analyze the Indian biodiversity
information, it is crucial to build an ontology that describes all the
essential terms of this domain from the unstructured format of the data
available on the web. Since, the curation of the ontologies heavily depends on
the domain where these are implemented hence there is no ideal methodology is
defined yet to be ready for universal use. The aim of this article is to
develop an ontology that semantically encodes all the terms of Indian
biodiversity information in all its dimensions based on the proposed
methodology. The comprehensive evaluation of the proposed ontology depicts that
ontology is well built in the specified domain.
