Terminologies in Earth System Science - State of the Art and Existing Applications

Slides for a presentation at the Workshop on Terminologies in Earth System Sciences, co-located to 3rd NFDI4Earth Plenary, 22 May 2024

Using terminologies can empower scientists and infrastructure providers to realise a machine-processable expression of the information contained in their research data and other academic outputs. In the academic world, ambiguity of terms and the lack of  appropriate keywords is tedious and annoying both, scientists and machines. In addition, there is a lack of controlled vocabularies for many scientific fields. In some cases, the selection of the most appropriate terminology is also difficult. On the other hand, repositories try to promote the use of terminologies as they offer building blocks for (meta-)data schemata and data annotations, and allow the persistent reference to concepts and terms by assigning identifiers like Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs or handles such as Digital Object identifiers (DOIs). 

The BITS project (BluePrints for the Integration of Terminology Services in Earth System Sciences) is trying to find solutions to these problems. As a first step, BITS builds a Terminology Service (TS) for subfields of climate science and geodiversity collections (Earth’s diversity of i.a. rocks, fossils, soils, sediments). For this, the project leverages the existing Terminology Service of the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, which currently features more than 200 ontologies, 920000 terms and over 29,000 properties from a range of domains such as architecture, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and physics. The TS will then be integrated into the two different data repositories of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) and the Senckenberg - Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research (SGN). In close collaboration with NFDI4Earth and the wider ESS community and TS4NFDI as the NFDI base service project for Terminology Services, the experience gained in building the TS and integrating it into the repositories at DKRZ and SGN will be used to create blueprints that can later be used to connect other Earth System Science repositories to the TS.