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Abstract
Knowledge transfer from biologists to engineers is one of the main obstacles to the diffusion of biomimetic. An approach to overcome this obstacle is presented and discussed. This approach is based on a construct to describe high-level engineering functions stored in a relational database together with a species grouping based on a functional classification, the corresponding biological solutions and the ‘official’ taxonomy. Several relationships among the keys allow extracting and organising the stored knowledge both from the engineering and from the biological point of view. An engineer can extract from this database all the biological solutions of a function formulated in the ‘engineer's language’, and then determine the more suitable solution for his/her specific problem.
Acknowledgements
The database has been realised in MicroSoft SQL Server 2008 Express Edition; the reports have been generated with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Report Builder 2.0 and rendered in MicroSoft Internet Explorer 8 and in Google Chrome 11.0.696.65 (the reports can anyway be rendered in other browsers).
Taxonomical data have been obtained from several databases, all accessed through GBIF data portal http://us.mirror.gbif.org/welcome.htm