The two days meeting featured interesting discussions centered on our results, plans for the final year of BITS, and an exploration of how a subsequent project phase could extend the BITS approach to provide ongoing support for the community. Following the format of previous annual meetings, we began with an update on the project's current status:
- The ESS collection has grown to encompass 46 terminologies, with more to be added as requested by the community.
- TIB has completed a feasibility study to improve traceability of changes in terminologies using handles for terms. We have assigned handles to selected terms in several versions of ENVO and DFGFO, with each handle now pointing to a distinct version of a term in a terminology.
- The ESS collection after the end of BITS will stay in the TIB Terminology Service (TIB TS), which is a permanent service. With the end of BITS, the special curation of the ESS collection will also end. However, TIB TS has quality criteria for all the terminologies it supports, and these criteria will be monitored. Furthermore, the entire Earth System Sciences community is invited to contribute to the ongoing development of the ESS collection by suggesting new terminologies, making public notes about terminologies and terms, and reporting errors.
- DKRZ reported on its thorough testing of several APIs (TIB TS, NERC , MOD) and the widgets of TS4NFDI. Moving forward, NERC SPARQL queries will be used, as they proved to be the most efficient method for the required term searches. TIB will investigate whether the same searches can be provided with the TIB TS API.
- In addition, DKRZ has improved the search functionality within the WDCC repository with terminologies and the TS. As a result, when variable names from data sets are used in a search, their corresponding definitions are now also provided. These names come from the Climate and Forecast Standard Names vocabulary, which is used in datasets from climate simulations and can seem complicated to non-climatologist researchers.
- SGN presented its work on the automatic annotation of datasets in the SGN database, which utilizes the TIB TS. Development is almost complete, and the routines used will now be prepared for open publication. The aim of the project is to automatically annotate descriptions of more than 1.5 million objects across124 collections.
Future work will involve further adapting the TIB TS to meet community needs and creating blueprints on how the TIB TS and the ESS collection can be used to improve search and automatic annotation. As always, we will keep you updated on our progress on the project website.
