Computer-supported collaborative knowledge modeling in ecology

We describe collaborative efforts between a knowledge representation team, a community of scientists, and scientific information managers in developing knowledge models for ecological and environmental sciences. Formal, structured approaches to knowledge representation used by the team (e.g., ontologies) can be informed by unstructured approaches to knowledge representation and semantic tagging already in use by the community. Observations about the process of collaboration between the team and the community are used to generate an interaction model for supporting software tools.