Building a Collaborative Knowledge Hub for AI-Powered Predictive Intelligence
Sensing Clues Foundation transformed nature conservation efforts by building sophisticated taxonomy management tools that enable field rangers to collect multilingual data through user-friendly applications, creating predictive intelligence to combat illegal poaching and habitat destruction.
The Client
Non-profit foundation dedicated to the preservation of nature and wildlife through deploying advanced technologies in the field, serving conservation organizations globally.
The Challenge
Conservation organizations require easy-to-use, multilingual tools for field rangers to track wildlife activity and monitor biodiversity, but existing solutions lack the sophisticated taxonomy management needed to model biodiversity domains while remaining low-effort and intuitive for users ranging from ecologists to data scientists.
The Solution
Sensing Clues implemented Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite to build vast organizational knowledge models supporting their Sensing Clues Tool Suite, utilizing controlled vocabularies, synonyms, multilingual labels, and contextual modeling for field data collection and analysis.
Technical capabilities
Built comprehensive taxonomies and ontologies modeling biodiversity and law enforcement domains with multilingual support.
Integrated linked open data to supplement taxonomies with external biodiversity information such as GBIF, IUCN and others.
Business outcomes
Easy and swift set-up of agile and scalable data collection schemes.
Created a user-friendly application suite accessible to field rangers without extensive training.
The Challenge
The impetus for Sensing Clues began when Founder and Director Jan Kees Schakel heard a gunshot in the middle of the night while in a forest reserve in Laos. He realized that combating illegal poaching “is actually something that requires a very professional approach.”
Conservation organizations faced a critical technology gap: they needed sophisticated tools to effectively combat illegal poaching and habitat destruction, but existing solutions were either too complex for field use or lacked the semantic depth required for effective wildlife intelligence.
Field organizations required tools that could handle the complexity of biodiversity data while remaining accessible to rangers with varying technical backgrounds. The solution needed to support multilingual operations for global conservation efforts, accommodate different naming conventions used in the field versus scientific terminology, and provide contextual modeling that could capture the relationships between wildlife observations, human activities, and environmental factors.
Most importantly, the technology needed to be “pragmatic,” “recognizable,” and “translatable” for field rangers who would be the primary users collecting critical data during daily patrols.
The Solution
Sensing Clues implemented Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite to power their Sensing Clues Tool Suite, which comprises three integrated applications: Cluey for data collection, Focus 360 for real-time analysis, and the Analytical Toolbox filled with tools for advanced predictive modeling.
The functionalities within the Cluey data collection app are built primarily with the Thesaurus Manager to take advantage of controlled vocabularies, synonyms, multilingual labels, contextual modeling, and more. From the backend, developers add concept schemes and concepts to the taxonomy to model possible actions taken by field rangers, observations they made, and typical animals within that field’s ecosystem.
The taxonomy describes what is used in the field ensuring that rangers using the Cluey app easily recognize the terminology. The Thesaurus Manager’s multilingual capabilities are especially important for rangers to be able to use their native languages, and the makeup of a semantic concept provides additional descriptive and contextual information so that rangers are not limited to one attribute. If Cluey was built off simple terms, Lion would just be Lion. As a concept, however, Lion is Lion, Leão, Lioness, King, Panthera Leo, and part of its taxonomic order.
As rangers click within Cluey, available options for reporting are narrowed down based on the taxonomy’s hierarchy in the backend. The Ontology Manager helps express relations between concept schemes to model ranger actions – so a ranger on foot patrol spots a lion and scares it away when it approaches the village. This semantic data feeds Focus and the Analytical Toolbox applications for analysis and predictive modeling, producing observation risk maps for anticipating illegal action.
The Impact
“I wanted a tool that would help me model the field of biodiversity and law enforcement within the biodiversity domain…[and with Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite] I could use it from the very start, almost without any help.”
Jan Kees Schakel, Founder and Director at Sensing Clues
Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite delivered the sophisticated taxonomy management tools needed to meet the demands of conservation work while remaining easy to use for training volunteers ranging from data scientists to software engineers to biologists. It enabled Sensing Clues to start foundational modeling for their taxonomies, while volunteers could easily contribute their programming expertise without extensive training.
The semantic concepts fill gaps between users’ language and scientific naming conventions through synonyms and multilingual labels. Added contextual relation modeling using ontologies and knowledge graphs enable ranger teams to interpret relations between thesaurus concepts to spot patterns in data. The taxonomy and ontology capabilities in Thesaurus Manager serve as the backbone of user-friendly applications that Sensing Clues delivers to field organizations.
Looking forward, Sensing Clues continues building on their data visualization tools by making use of knowledge graphs in the Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite, working on intuitive graph visualizations that help field rangers spot data patterns while maintaining their key principle of intuitive usability.
Struggling with complex domain knowledge that needs to be accessible to non-technical field users, multilingual operations requiring consistent terminology, or sophisticated backend systems that must present simple frontend experiences?
Whether you're a conservation organization, field research institution, or domain-specific organization, Graphwise can help you:
Build comprehensive domain taxonomies and ontologies with multilingual and synonym support
Create user-friendly applications powered by sophisticated semantic technologies
Enable predictive intelligence through contextual knowledge modeling
Develop intuitive knowledge graph visualizations for pattern recognition
