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A Linked Science investigation: enhancing climate change data discovery with semantic technologies

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Abstract

Linked Science is the practice of inter-connecting scientific assets by publishing, sharing and linking scientific data and processes in end-to-end loosely coupled workflows that allow the sharing and re-use of scientific data. Much of this data does not live in the cloud or on the Web, but rather in multi-institutional data centers that provide tools and add value through quality assurance, validation, curation, dissemination, and analysis of the data. In this paper, we make the case for the use of scientific scenarios in Linked Science. We propose a scenario in river-channel transport that requires biogeochemical experimental data and global climate-simulation model data from many sources. We focus on the use of ontologies—formal machine-readable descriptions of the domain—to facilitate search and discovery of this data. Mercury, developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is a tool for distributed metadata harvesting, search and retrieval. Mercury currently provides uniform access to more than 100,000 metadata records; 30,000 scientists use it each month. We augmented search in Mercury with ontologies, such as the ontologies in the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) collection by prototyping a component that provides access to the ontology terms from Mercury. We evaluate the coverage of SWEET for the ORNL Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC).

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Notes

  1. http://linkedscience.org/events/lisc2011/

    http://linkedscience.org/events/lisc2012/

  2. http://www.earthsystemgrid.org/

  3. http://daac.ornl.gov/

  4. http://semanticportal.esipfed.org/

  5. http://old.cni.org/pub/NISO/docs/z39.50-brochure/

  6. http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/

  7. http://www.opensearch.org/

Abbreviations

API:

Application programming interface

EC2l:

Amazon’s elastic compute cloud

EPA:

Environmental protection agency

ESGF:

Earth system grid federation

ESIP:

Earth science information partners

FTP:

File transfer protocol

ISO:

International standards organization

MODIS:

Moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer

NASA:

National areonautics and space administration

NCBO:

National center for bio-medical ontologies

OAI-PMH:

Open archives initiatives-protocol for metadata harvesting

ORNL:

Oak ridge national laboratory

ORNL DAAC:

ORNL distributed active archive center

OWL:

(W3C) web ontology language

RDF:

(W3C) resource description format

SKOS:

(W3C) simple knowledge organization system

SPARQL:

W3C query language for RDF

SWEET:

Semantic web earth and environmental terminology

SWSE:

Semantic web search engine

TB:

Terabyte

URL:

Uniform resource locator

USGS:

US geological survey

VA:

Virtual appliance

W3C:

World wide web consortium

XML:

(W3C) extensible markup language

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Acknowledgments

This work has been in part performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Managed by UT Battelle, LLC under Contract No. De-AC05-00OR22725 for the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Correspondence to Line C. Pouchard.

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Communicated by: H. A. Babaie

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Pouchard, L.C., Branstetter, M.L., Cook, R.B. et al. A Linked Science investigation: enhancing climate change data discovery with semantic technologies. Earth Sci Inform 6, 175–185 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-013-0118-2

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