Bioinspire-Explore: Taxonomy-Driven Exploration of Biodiversity Data for Bioinspired Innovation

Abstract

Successful bioinspired design depends on practitioners' access to biological data in a relevant form. Although multiple open-access biodiversity databases exist, their presentation is often adapted to life scientists, rather than bioinspired designers. In this paper, we present a new tool, "Bioinspire-Explore", for navigating biodiversity data in order to uncover biological systems of interest for a range of sectors. Bioinspire-Explore allows users to search for inspiring biological models via taxa (species, genera, etc.) as an entry point. It provides information on a taxon's position in the "tree of life", its distribution and climatic niche, as well as its appearance. Bioinspire-Explore also shows users connections in the bioinspiration literature between their taxon of interest and associated biological processes, habitats, and physical measurements by way of their semantic proximity. We believe Bioinspire-Explore has the potential to become an indispensable resource for both biologists and bioinspired designers in different fields.

Keywords: NLP; biodiversity; bioinspiration; biology push; computer-aided biomimetics; data science; open-access; taxonomy.

Figure 1

Search bar automatically suggests taxonomic terms associated with a query, covering both (A) scientific names and (B) vernacular names.

Figure 2

Examples of dynamic taxonomic diagrams following multiple queries associated with bees. (A) Linear diagram created after single search for the bee species Megachile kalina; (B) expansion of the “taxonomic children” of the genus Megachile; (C) subsequent search for the desert ant species Cataglyphis bombycinus.

Figure 3

Four main types of information are provided through Bioinspire-Explore for a selected taxon Arnica montana. (A) Its Wikipedia page, (B) spatial distribution, (C) images, and (D) climate characteristics.

Figure 4

(A) Schematic illustration of semantic proximity of various types of entities “taxon”, “ecozone/habitat”, “biological process”; (B) screenshot of the semantic expansion module in Bioinspire-Explore. Here, the taxon entity Vespa soror appears semantically related to other taxa such as Hymenoptera.

Figure 5

User journey within Bioinspire-Explore, illustrating the functionalities of different tabs within the tool: (A) visit of the “Bioinspirations” page presenting bioinspiration examples; (B) then moving to the “Biodiversity” page to learn more on a given taxon; (C) the “Go Further” page gives an overview of closely-related entities within the scientific literature; and (D) end of the user journey by either doing another research or using the pre-filled external links.

Figure 6

Possible uses Bioinspire-Explore within a biomimetic methodological framework. After Fayemi et al. (2017) [41].