To achieve the dream of the semantic web, it must be possible for ordinary users to invoke services. It is clear that users need simple-to-invoke-and-use services. This dissertation offers an ontological approach to declaratively create services that users can invoke using free-form, natural-language-like specifications. Our approach uses task ontologies as foundational knowledge. A task ontology consists of a domain ontology and a process ontology. The domain ontology encodes domain information such as possible constraints and instances in terms of object sets, relationship sets among these object sets, and operations over values in object sets and relationship sets. The process ontology consists of generic processes that are domain independent-coded once and work for all. Our system recognizes the constraints in a service request, discovers any missing information and obtains it from users, and formalizes the constraints in the context of the domain ontology. The system satisfies the constraints by obtaining information from databases associated with the domain ontology and providing users with solutions or near solutions when there is no way to satisfy all the constraints. Our experiments with our prototype implementation show that our approach can create services that satisfy end-user needs.

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A revolution is brewing within global biodiversity governance as attempts to govern and to deal with biodiversity loss have not led to any substantial results. The underlying drivers of biodiversity loss keep adding to the total ecological predicament which in turn sets in motion an epistemological paradigm shift (episteme) with a call for transformative change. This shift of episteme confronts Western modern ways of thinking and challenges to leave bifurcated views of Nature behind. This leads to a shift in the great conservation debate towards a new Anthropocene conservation debate, where new discursive positions arise stressing to move beyond nature-culture dichotomies and beyond capitalism. These positions challenge the reformist and prosaic mainstream conservation regime of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) with its tendency for rational problem-solving and incremental adjustments.  Contemporary process philosophers are now also creating their own discursive niche position within academia as “Earth bound”. This study draws from this position to shed a different light on the new Anthropocene conservation debate. It outlines how a “dogmatic image of thought” and how “the fallacy of the bifurcation of Nature” have created the conditions for the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss maintaining the mainstream conservation regime. “Living in harmony with nature” and “bending the curve of biodiversity loss” prove to be useful synergetic epistemic notions to break out of the dogmatic image and to leave bifurcation behind. Process-relational thinking can help understand how transition governance can support new policies that aim to create cross-scale alignments for local action within international negotiations.  Therefore, this study proposes a renewed process-inspired transition governance, which could help to find capacities that have yet remained unexercised. Based on speculative methods creating social-ecological imaginaries, these capacities can be discovered but this requires the global conservation community to see beyond the dogmatic image and bifurcation in the journey to living in harmony with nature in 2050, for which the epistemic notions of “living in harmony with nature” and “bending the curve of biodiversity loss” could turn out to be useful synergetic starting points.