Ecosystems, if sustainable managed and protected benefit current and future people. The concept of ecosystem services, the flow of benefits from nature to people, provides one novel framework to put forward this vision. The challenge for current and future generations is to understand and account for these benefits in a way that enables a sustainable quality of life for people while also conserving the biodiversity that provides the flow of services. Although ecosystem services science has continue to evolve in the past decade, little has been said on how the natural capital assets can promote an effectively, fairly, and sustainable conservation of the coastal zone. The main objective of this study was to develop a controlled vocabulary or ontology of the links between the provisioning and consuming of ecosystem services in the coastal zone of the Gulf of Mexico. Ontologies are useful to map knowledge in terms of attributes and relationships that provide a conceptual structure to information. Therefore, the developed ontology adds the ability to integrate semantic information through classes, instances derived from the provision-consumer models, and the relevant relationships among classes and instances. The ontology used the ecosystem services classification proposed by the Millennium Ecosystem assessment and was implemented in a geographic information system. This ontology will provide the capacity in a second phase of this study to conduct value transfer analysis and meta-analysis of the ecosystem services non-market value in the Gulf of Mexico. The developed semantic map will be very useful while developing queries to the database and linking the value and its interpretation. This controlled vocabulary represents a conceptual framework useful in communicating the value of the benefits provided by ecosystems that also provides an integrated model for simulation of the capacity of ecosystems to provide such benefits.