The ARIES methodology is based on explicit conceptualizations (ontologies: Villa, Athanasiadis et al. 2009) that lay out first of all a novel vision of ES, based on the breakdown into individual benefits, each of which is modeled independently, then linked to the others. Domain ontologies in ARIES result from a large-scale expert consensus. Artificial intelligence techniques (machine reasoning, pattern recognition) examine source data and extract from the ontologies models that best represent the situation at hand. ARIES builds ad- hoc, probabilistic Bayesian Network models (Cowell, Dawid et al. 1999) that are used to map the ecological and socioeconomic factors contributing to the provision and use of ecosystem services. These models enable the use of corresponding GIS data to produce maps of.
