Hendrikje Seifert

• Nowadays, with the environment and climate changing, there is a vast amount of research data being produced as part of environmental and biological studies in order to gain foundational knowledge to help sustainability and nature conservation. Biodiversity research on all scales deliver a wide range in variety of data types, speed of data generation and storage volume, which requires comprehensive management on many levels. This leads to a complex environment which is only controllable by detailed planning and long-term management of such data. Official guides to best practice data handling and several internationally agreed standards aid an intelligent integration of information. Legal frameworks, such as the “Nagoya protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization”, are in place to improve clarification on data handling conditions and restrict biopiracy. However, even though there are guidelines and best practices on how to handle diverse data throughout its lifecycle, the heterogeneity and patchiness of data available from open public archives and databases pose a problem for information extraction to an end user- it is a challenge to retrieve information from unstable, decentralized data sources. In this thesis a previously developed Nagoya protocol lookup service prototype was refined for gaps in the data landscape which can be applied by various stakeholders. A representational proof-of-principle ontology was developed to add to the comprehensiveness of the knowledge representations available to stakeholders. This ontology (NagO) is focused on the United Kingdom, its external territories and their link to the Nagoya protocol. It is a demonstration of a consolidated, open knowledge source for legal, document, sovereignty and Nagoya protocol matters, which to date are only retrievable from various different sources including web searches, fact sheets, experts and governmental authorities.