Function-Property based Categorization of Biomimicry

Abstract

Modern technologies have been developed for convenience of human being. Technologies that provide the easier, faster, and richer service to human are gradually destroying the nature. Attempts for creating a sustaining technology have been continued in recent years. Human must follow the path from the organism living in the nature so that they can conserve the energy to minimize the energy loss, and create a virtuous circle as living organisms. Biomimetiics is the combined word for ‘bios, meaning life’ and ‘mimetics, meaning to imitate.’ Imitating the life will provide the engineers creative insights and will lead to sustaining innovation. Biomimicry is a new science field that studies nature’s models and emulate it in order to solve the human problems. It is the mentor for human beings to view and value the nature, and introduces what we can extract from the nature. Nature has learned what actually works and what lasts for 3.8 billion years due to evolution. This entails the ecological standard to judge sustainability of our innovation lies in the nature’s models. However, there are innumerable biomimetic cases that exist in the nature, and only some of the cases are organized. The classic website for biomimetics is AskNature.org and this website has taxonomy to categorize 1620 biomimetic cases. However, AskNature’s taxonomy has limitations in categorizing the biomimetic cases, and this paper proposes the method to create a taxonomy that could be utilized by enabling specific search through the use of WordNet. Using WordNet’s synset, synonyms will be mapped to the keyword to search all the synonyms in the same level. Coordinate terms that shares hypernym will be used to search terminology in similar category due to same hypernym. Also, hypernym-troponym will be used to adjust the level of the function and property. When action, object, property, and modifiers which chain query terms together is determined by the user, the proposed method will provide more detailed results and connect the results to the relevant patents to realize the design.