1. Introduction back to ToC

Current climate change must be understood within the context of past climate variations, which are inferred from indirect measurements known as paleoclimate observations. A grand challenge for paleoclimatology is that these observations come in very disparate formats, so there is no standard way to exchange these records between researchers, or with machines. This hinders their re-use and hence lowers their value to science and society. Traditionally, these observations have been archived in data warehouses where the experts that make them have very little control over them. The Earthcube-supported LinkedEarth project aims to change this by creating an online platform that will do two things: (1) enable the curation of a publicly-accessible database by paleoclimate experts and (2) foster the development of standards, so paleoclimate data are easier to analyze, share, and re-use.

LinkedEarth will lower barriers to participation in the geosciences, enabling more "dark data" to join the public domain using community-sanctioned protocols. Facilitating access to geolocated data will open the door to integration with other disciplines (e.g. climate modeling, paleoecology, paleobiology, archeology), and to new educational tools, allowing educators to weave historical narratives around events documented in the paleoclimate record. The Linked Earth ontology aims to define a common model for structuring and annotating plaeoclimate data.

1.1. Namespace declarations back to ToC

Table 1: Namespaces used in the document
rdfs<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
schema<http://schema.org/>
terms<http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
xsd<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>
owl<http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#>
vann<http://purl.org/vocab/vann/>
geo<http://www.opengis.net/ont/geosparql#>
wgs_84<http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#>
rdf<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>