First Review of the ESS Collection

First Review of the Earth System Sciences Collection

BITS extends the TIB's existing Terminology Service (TS) with a collection that is potentially useful for the Earth System Sciences (ESS) community, the ESS Collection. Shortly after the launch of BITS in July 2023, we started the ESS collection with terminologies that were already in the TIB TS. In the following months, we added terminologies which were suitable for describing climate science datasets and geoscientific collections (including mineralogy, petrology and palaeontology). After almost a year of adding terminologies to the ESS collection, we felt that it was time to do a first review of this collection.

By the end of June 2024, the ESS collection contained 36 terminologies, which can be sorted by topic:

9 terminologies describing metadata and data structures,
3 terminologies describing physical units,
6 terminologies describing the methods used for measurements or observations,
18 terminologies describing the values measured or observed.

However, this classification is not strict as there are terminologies, such as SWEET, which cover more than one of these topics. Only 3 of the 36 terminologies are SKOS vocabularies, all others are OWL ontologies. 10 OWL ontologies are only hierarchical and should therefore considered as thesauri rather than (expressive) ontologies. The other 23 are classified as ontologies.

There were proposals to add another 21 terminologies to the ESS collection. However, these terminologies could not be incorporated into the TIB's OLS system for various reasons. In the case of errors in the terminology itself, we have contacted the respective creators, as TIB’s TS team does not modify a terminology created by others. We will try again to include these terminologies on a regular basis.

We are still working on ingesting the Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Conventions vocabularies from the NERC Vocabulary Server, which haven't been ingested because they are highly connected SKOS vocabularies containing terms that have narrower/broader connections to terms in other vocabularies. This poses technical problems due to the complex relationships, as TIB TS is designed for OWL ontologies and only has the additional capability to ingest simple SKOS vocabularies. Due to the importance of the CF vocabulary for the ESS community, we are looking for alternative ways to ingest these vocabularies: We started with the CF Standard Name Vocabulary and greatly simplified the relational structure so that it could be ingested. We are now working on including more and more relations, so that the vocabulary is still ingestible, but also so that we preserve as many relations between terms as possible.

Adding more terminologies to the ESS collection is a work in progress. Suggestions for additional terminologies can always be made by the whole ESS community, e.g. by using the “Suggest”-button on the webpage of the ESS collection. If these terminologies meet the quality criteria, are relevant to the ESS and can be included in the TIB TS, they will be added to the ESS collection.

More information on the review of the ESS collection can be found in Ganske, A., Stocker, M., Martens, C., and Wolodkin, A. (2024): Compilation and Examination of the Existing Specialised Semantic Artefacts for the Earth System Sciences. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14136104 .