This repository is used to summarize and report the methodology and results of "Towards a Core Ontology for Hierarchies of Hypotheses in Invasion Biology". This study will be submitted to 17th International Conference on Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2020) (https://2020.eswc-conferences.org/): Poster and Demo track.

Scientific research necessitates the exchange of a high amount of heterogeneous complex, (un)structured knowledge, which demands strategies to enable data integration and reuse to facilitate efficient communication and information exchange. However, a key factor that hinders integration of these aspects is the lack of a formal basis for modeling these heterogeneous data. Formal representation of scientific hypotheses plays a crucial role in the scientific research life cycle, such as keeping up with the recent updates on a research area, providing explanations of research findings and the evolving of scientific hypotheses and their provenances. To this end, in this paper, we introduce the design of the Hierarchy of Hypotheses (HoH) core ontology to semantically capture and model the information contained in hierarchies of hypotheses created for the research field of invasion biology. The proposed core ontology is based on a number of well structured related ontologies, which provide a solid basis for its main entities

The accepted version can be accesed vis the publisher web site

This repository includes almost the material related to the development of a core ontology for HoH. It includes the following:

• Original hypotheses; this foloder includes the source set of twelves hypotheses Hypotheses_v0.doc as well as a number of hand crafted trial to develop the ontology

• OntologyTerms; this folder includes the set of extracted terms from the input hypotheses along with the set of ontologies from BioPortal containing these terms.

• The code folder has the termSerach source code used to lookup which ontologies from BioPortal containing the set of terms as well as the module extractor used to extract a module from the the selected ontology

• The preliminary outcome of the ontology deveoplemnt is stored in the ontologHoH folder.

Acknowledgments: This work has been mostly funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the CRC 1076 AquaDiva [http://www.aquadiva.uni-jena.de/]