This paper addresses two research questions: “How should a well-engineered methodology facilitate the development of ontologies within communities of practice?” and “What methodology should be used?” If ontologies are to be developed by communities then the ontology development life cycle should be better understood within this context. This paper presents the Melting Point (MP), a proposed new...

Water quality is largely influenced by the abundance and diversity of indigenous microbes present within an aquatic environment. Physical, chemical and biological contaminants from anthropogenic activities can accumulate in aquatic systems causing detrimental ecological consequences. Approaches exploiting microbial processes are now being utilized for the detection, and removal or reduction of ...

Biological invasions are one of the largest ecological and economic problems we face. Invasive species represent one of the most significant threats to biological diversity, along with habitat loss and fragmentation (Wilcove et al., 1998; Pimentel et al., 2000). Thus, any knowledge we can contribute to understanding the process of invasion will have huge benefits for humanity. In particular, id...

Biological surveys provide the raw material for assembling ecological patterns. These include the properties of parameters such as range, abundance, dispersion, evenness and diversity; the relationships between these parameters; the relationship between geographical distributions and landscape structure; and the co-occurrence of species. These patterns have often been used in the past to evalua...

The security gap is widening as adversarial communities of all kinds employ more sophisticated techniques and broaden their targets of opportunity. These adversarial communities are structured as self organized proactive collaborators in tight learning loops driving rapid innovation – preying upon systems protected by wait and see strategies. In this paper we build upon six fundamental characte...

The rank abundance of common and rare species within ecological communities is remarkably consistent from the tropics to the tundra. This invariant patterning provides one of ecology's most enduring and unified tenets: most species rare and a few very common. Increasingly, attention is focused upon elucidating biological mechanisms that explain these species abundance distributions (SADs), but ...

The Atlantic hurricanes of 1999 caused widespread environmental damage throughout the Caribbean and US mid-Atlantic coastal regions. However, these storms also proved beneficial to certain microbial habitats; specifically, cyanobacteria-dominated mats. Modern mats represent the oldest known biological communities on earth, stromatolites. Contemporary mats are dominant biological communities in ...