BITS – BluePrints for the Integration of Terminology Services in Earth System Sciences

BITS aims to address a major remaining obstacle to the application of FAIR principles in Earth System Science (ESS) by addressing the inadequate implementation of encoding semantics or, in other words, data interoperability of research data. Within BITS, a Terminology Service (TS) will be established at the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology for subfields of climate science and geoscientific collections (involving curated objects from mineralogy, petrology, and paleontology) and integrated at the two different data repositories of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) and the Senckenberg - Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research (SGN). The experience gained in setting up the TS and integrating it into the repositories at DKRZ and SGN will be used to create blueprints that can later serve to link other Earth System Science repositories to the TS, in close collaboration with NFDI4Earth and the wider ESS community.

This new TS will serve as a valuable resource for researchers, students, professionals, and developers, empowering them with accurate and consistent terminology to enhance their work, improve communication, and advance knowledge in their respective fields. By providing a reliable and user-friendly tool, it will contribute significantly to the promotion of open science and effective information exchange within the scientific community.

 

News

From 22 to 25 September 2025, the NFDI4Earth Plenary and the NFDI4Biodiversity Joint Plenary will bring together Earth System and Biodiversity research communities to discuss shared challenges and solutions in research data management.


On September 26, BITS contributed to the Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CORDI 2025) in Aachen with a poster presentation on:

“Enhancing Interoperability in Earth System Sciences: The BITS Project and the Role of the TIB Terminology Service”
(Anette Ganske, Alexander Wolodkin, Angelina Kraft, Hannes Thiemann)

The poster highlighted how…