ALTER-Net is a "Network of Excellence" (NoE) funded by the EU's 6th Framework Programme with the goal of creat-ing a European long-term interdisciplinary facility for research on the complex relationship between ecosystems, biodi-versity and society. Within this NoE, Work Package I6 has the task of constructing a framework within which can be built a system to manage biodiversity data, information and knowledge from the NoE.

Based on the user requirements, we have formulated our vision of an ideal architecture for such a network, based on an object oriented Data Structure, also referred to as an ontology. This means that there are classes, instances (of classes) and relations between them (classes as well as instances). Additionally, it should be possible to derive or inherit new data types from existing ones.

In such an ontology, metadata and data are all represented in the same object oriented data structure, thus removing the artificial divide between metadata and data. “One man’s metadata is another man’s data (and vice versa).”

One important concept in the creation of ontologies is that, while instances may be created independently by the net-work partners, the creation of classes requires a commitment by the community members. Once the necessary classes have been defined, partial ontologies dealing with individual topic areas can be created and maintained independently. Some topics of partial ontologies are:
• Taxonomic lists (species, vegetation types, soil types…)
• Lists of political administration unites (as references)
• Topologic (geographic) data
• Literature citations
• Socio economic data. (Crop yields…)
Metadata mark-up then consists not of entering the actual information but rather linking to the relevant partial ontolo-gies. We will be presenting the basic core ontology required for the representation of ecological and socio-economic data.