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Although soil ecology has benefited from recent advances in describing the functional and trophic traits of soil organisms, large scale reconstruction of soil food webs is still hampered by the issues that (1) most of the data about trophic interactions and diets are distributed across heterogeneous repositories, (2) no well-established terminology exists for describing trophic groups, feeding processes, and resource types, and (3) large heterogeneity exists in the trophic classification of different soil organisms, or such classifications are lacking. Here, we propose the Soil Food Web Ontology as a new formal framework for representing knowledge on trophic ecology of soil organisms. This ontology captures the semantics of trophic concepts, including consumer-resource interactions, diets and feeding processes, and provides a formalisation of trophic group definitions. This ontology can be used to add semantic annotations to trophic data, thus facilitating the integration of heterogeneous datasets. It also provides lexical resources that can support the development of information extraction tools for the creation of literature-based datasets. Finally, it enables automatic and consistent classification of soil organisms based on their trophic relationships. We argue that, by harmonising the terminology and underlying concepts of soil trophic ecology, our ontology allows a better use of available information on the feeding habits of soil organisms and sounder trophic classifications, thus facilitating the reconstruction of soil food webs and making food web research more accessible, reusable and reproducible. |
