Improving ecological (meta)data FAIRness through semantic services: integration of EcoPortal in LifeWatch Italy new platforms

LifeWatch Italy serves as the Italian Distributed Center for the LifeWatch ERIC Infrastructure, contributing significantly to the ERIC's functionality. Focused on biodiversity and ecosystem research data management, LifeWatch Italy enhances data sharing, integration, and analysis through its Data Portal and Metadata Catalogue. Recent efforts by LifeWatch Italy aimed at improving FAIRness involve integrating EcoPortal, a semantic artefacts catalogue, with the Data Portal and Metadata Catalogue.

EcoPortal supports the scientific community in managing semantic artefacts in the ecological domain and employs the Ontology FAIRness Evaluator (O’FAIRe) tool for FAIRness assessment. Challenges we are trying to address include enhancing metadata annotation with FAIR semantic artefacts. The expected impacts of the integration between EcoPortal and the new Data Portal and Metadata Catalogue of LifeWatch Italy encompass easier ecological data discovery, annotation, machine-actionable meta(data), and a push towards Linked Open Data.