SEMANTIC SOFTWARE, PERSISTENT IDS AND CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES FOR GEOSCIENCE METADATA

UNAVCO, UCAR, and Cornell University are working together to leverage semantic web technologies to enable discovery of people, data, tools, publications and other research products, as well as the connections between them. The EarthCollab project, an NSF EarthCube Building Block, is utilizing an existing open-source semantic web application, VIVO, to enable connectivity across distributed networks of researchers and resources related to the following two geoscience-based communities: (1) the Bering Sea Project, an interdisciplinary field program whose data archive is hosted by NCAR's Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL), and (2) UNAVCO, a geodetic facility and consortium that supports diverse research projects informed by geodesy.

EarthCollab has released two public proof-of-concept sites: Connect UNAVCO (connect.unavco.org) and EOL Arctic Data Connects (vivo.eol.ucar.edu). The sites provide machine-readable linked data for easy re-use and querying, as well as a human-readable website for data discovery and exploration. Improvements to the sites have been made based on usability testing conducted at last year’s GSA and AGU meetings.. Enhanced browsing features, such as filtering and sorting have been added. A controlled set of relevant geoscience research terms based on GSA and AGU publication keywords has been developed for Connect UNAVCO to allow searching and linking people by research and expertise. Additionally, we have developed an extension to cross-link separate VIVO instances across institutions, allowing local display of externally curated information. For example, a faculty page at Cornell will display UNAVCO's dataset information (data DOIs appropriate for citation) and UNAVCO's VIVO will display a Cornell faculty member’s contact and position information. We will use persistent identifiers, such as ORCIDs for people, publication DOIs, data DOIs and unique NSF grant numbers to optimize cross-linking, to minimize data duplication and ambiguity across and within VIVO instances.

Two areas for future work are further exploration of customizations to the VIVO software and cross-linking capabilities based on continued usability testing, as well as alignment of our controlled vocabularies with existing vocabularies (e.g. FAST) and vocabularies used by publishers (e.g. GSA and AGU).