Extracting Structural Knowledge from Natural Language Documents to Support Biologically Inspired Design

Given a design problem in the context of biologically inspired design, most designers search for natural language documents describing biological cases on the internet, and then construct an understanding of the biological cases for potential transfer to the design problem. IBID is an interactive tool for extracting knowledge of the function, structure, and causal mechanisms of a biological system from its natural language description and organizing this knowledge as a Structure-BehaviorFunction model. In this article, we briefly describe how IBID extracts structural knowledge about biological systems from natural language texts and uses the structural knowledge for accessing biology articles relevant to a design problem.