Published February 1, 2024 | Version v1
Project deliverable Open

D2.3 - FAIR-EASE semantic brokerage service

  • 1. ROR icon National Oceanography Centre
  • 2. ROR icon Marine Information Service (Netherlands)
  • 3. ROR icon National Research Council

Contributors

  • 1. Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (UNINA)
  • 2. Vlaams Instituut vor de Zee (VLIZ)

Description

Semantic brokerage is a key component of the FAIR-EASE (FE) Interdisciplinary Data Discovery and Access Service (IDDAS), because the data access services behind the IDDAS are diverse in syntax (technical formats) and semantics (content/used vocabularies). In order to provide a user of the FAIR-EASE Virtual Research Environment (or Earth Analytical Labs) optimised discovery and access to the datasets, both syntactic and semantic brokerage is needed. A solution that many EOSC developments benefit from. As part of the metadata brokerage service, the FE semantic brokerage provides translation services between the various terminologies used by the diverse data sources. It enables semantically enhanced discovery of datasets and facilitates semantic interoperability through alignment. 

To deliver this level of semantic alignment it requires a comprehensive understanding of the datasets targeted, their metadata elements and structure, and the semantic elements and concepts they contain. This is achieved with the help of a newly developed software application, the “Semantic Analyser” (SA). The SA extracts textual information from selected metadata records and data files, and compares it to semantic artefacts (terms from ontologies and controlled vocabularies) held in a purpose-built FE Knowledge Base. 

The second part of the work focuses on a harmonised metadata profile following the DCAT Linked Data standard. This target profile (in principe generally applicable) will provide the option to enable machine to machine discovery of datasets, independent of datasets being published in a metadata catalogue (harmonised syntactically by the DAB) or via subsetting services like ERDDAP, BEACON or other. FAIR-EASE has undertaken research on how this difference can be overcome, and provide later implementation prototypes via its IDDAS.

The resulting federation of semantically connected data resources, will facilitate the sharing of multi-disciplinary datasets with the FE Uniform Data Access Layer (UDAL), and allow for interaction with the Earth Analytic Lab (EAL).

Files

FAIR-EASE_D2.3_FAIR-EASE semantic brokerage service.pdf

Files (1.4 MB)

Additional details

Related works

Continues
Project deliverable: 10.5281/zenodo.7920551 (DOI)
Project deliverable: 10.5281/zenodo.8337393 (DOI)

Funding

FAIR-EASE – FAIR EArth Sciences & Environment services 101058785
European Commission
FAIR EArth Sciences & Environment services (FAIR-EASE) 10039779
UK Research and Innovation

Dates

Submitted
2024-02-01