"Biomimetics"? - why not just mimetics?

The field of Biomimetics or Biomimicry applies generated by nature through evolution, to solve scientific challenges. While inventions such as Velcro, Swarm algorithms etc. are some famous examples of technology inspired by nature, why not extend the idea to be inspired from multiple domains.

An example is the idea of TRIZ developed by a scientist in the former Soviet Union Genrich Altschuller. Altschuller postulated that solutions that exist in one domain (example: automobiles) could help solve a challenge in a very different domain (example: medicine). He found such cross-domain solutions using the patent corpus as a source. So biomimetics seems to be a specialized case of TRIZ that uses biological organisms an information source.

AskNature is a website that seems to be a great start at collecting such data and making biomimetics usable. It would be a good next step to release the data into public domain or expose as an API, so it can be integrated into other applications.

Overall we feel that the concept of mimetics should be extended across corpora - biological, patents, journals etc. Only then will the true power of this approach be realized.