Role of Semantic Resources in Infrastructures for Data Management in Agrosystems and Landscape Research

In 2023, the FAIRagro project started its work as a consortium of almost 30 partnering organizations active in agrosystems research in Germany. FAIRagro is part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) initiative with its goal to set up a cross-domain research data infrastructure (RDI) conforming to the FAIR principles. The main objective is to establish an interoperable and scalable RDI by connecting available repositories to facilitate combined data analyses. Partly, existing agricultural data repositories involved in FAIRagro already use semantic resources like vocabularies and thesauri. For example, the Smart Rural Area Data Infrastructure (SRADI) developed and maintained by the Technical University of Munich leverages metadata vocabularies like DCAT and Dublin Core, but also strives for compatibility with well established geospatial data standards as provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium. The BonaRes Repository, as another example, was launched in 2017 at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) and manages soil-agricultural data from research projects. To address FAIR data principles, numerous open community standards, vocabularies and PIDs, e.g. INSPIRE and DataCite for metadata description, AGROVOC for keyword annotation and ORCID for author annotation are used.

Within that context, there are challenges especially regarding cross-linking of data sets and repositories and a need for cross-standard interoperability. Large Linked Data resources like AGROVOC can provide bridges through URI-based metadata annotations. For practical purposes, this however requires consistent use according to best practices, mappings and alignments. The presentation will illustrate how the FAIRagro project addresses these issues within its activities.