Making the right choices to sustain biodiversity requires access to the right information. However, it can be very difficult to find appropriate data sources and reuse them, to combine data from different studies for more comprehensive analyses, or make decisions based on particular data sets, due to ambiguous knowledge of what and how data were measured and recorded. The recent rise in metadata requirements and standards is an important step in overcoming this problem, but metadata can only take us so far without underlying semantics, that is, a clear, computable representation of what the data and metadata mean. The goal of this symposium is to present contemporary work on biodiversity ontologies and semantic technologies - both theoretical and applied - with a focus on how such work builds capacity in biodiversity informatics. Presentations that cover theoretical work should discuss why the theory is important for biodiversity standards and capacity building, while presentation on applications should stress practical consequences.

Relevant abstracts are invited in this symposium track.