Leveraging AgroPortal ontologies to ease metadata completion and data discovery in Data INRAE

Data INRAE is a French institutional data repository (INRAE ; France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment), part of “Recherche Data Gouv” (French Data Repository), and based on Dataverse technology. Datasets are referenced with key words, selected by dataverse managers. In the current way, these managers can use any terms or semantic artefacts and few belong to control vocabularies. This use case aims to connect AgroPortal with Data INRAE. AgroPortal is a semantic artefacts catalog for agri-food and related domains. The goal of the connection is to facilitate the control vocabularies use for keyword completion. Control vocabularies improve our ability to find and reuse stored data and participate in their interoperability. In fine, a better keyword usage should improve data INRAE FAIRness. In this use case, we will evaluate the practices and data FAIRness evolution. 

In recent years, an increasing number of data repositories have been deployed to address the need of research data publication and reuse. In the case of INRAE, France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, research data is either shared via domain repositories or via an institutional repository: Data INRAE, now a part of the French federated national research data platform Recherche Data Gouv.

This national repository is based on the open source research data repository software Dataverse. Data repositories softwares such as Dataverse allow datasets to be documented by metadata, but these metadata fields often function as sole texts rather than semantic concepts, without enrichment, expanded search on related terms or multilingualism.

Semantic artefacts of interest to INRAE are hosted in AgroPortal, a repository for ontologies and other semantic artefacts in agri-food and related domains. AgroPortal is based on the generic technology OntoPortal developed jointly by INRAE-MISTEA, University of Montpellier and the OntoPortal Alliance. AgroPortal allows users to search and browse for terms in a user-friendly interface and can also be called automatically by tools through APIs.

This use case aims at bridging the gap between these platforms; data repositories and semantic artefacts catalog, by developing a connector in Data INRAE to be able to use semantic artefacts from AgroPortal in an user-friendly way, and make it usable and available to all users of Dataverse or Ontoportal technologies.