Managing semantic annotations on medicinal plants

Images repositories would become a costly and meaningless data pool without descriptive metadata. The ability to represent pharmacobotanical semantics is of great importance when teaching and registering biological data about medicinal plants. It will not only enhance discovery and retrieval of knowledge, but it will also enable its translation and reuse in contexts other than the original one. This paper addresses the issues of capturing knowledge necessary to register and retrieve pharmacobatonical data using semantic descriptions. We depict an architecture for automating the semantic annotation of botanical materials based on ontological concepts. The approach is illustrated a case study on annotating data sources containing representations of Brazilian medicinal plants.