Ontology-Enhanced Thesaurus for Promoting Biomimetics Research

This chapter discusses Ontology-Enhanced Thesaurus (OET) and Keyword Explorer, which play a role of the knowledge infrastructure for promoting biomimetics research. The key to the diffusion of biomimetics is the strongly coordinated efforts among the researchers in biology, and the researchers and engineers in chemistry, physics, and other related disciplines. Although the ontology in OET looks like an ordinary ontology as a kind of ontology mentioned above, it is different from the existing ones in the sense that it is a specialization of such conventional ontologies that are developed for generic purposes or use for metadata. There are quite a few systems/tools for supporting innovative design based on biomimetics or Biology-Inspired Design. Keyword Explorer is an application program running on OET to explore the space spanned by the concepts defined in OET considering each concept as a keyword for use of retrieval of relevant information.