Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The study of the Earth system involves a wide range of disciplines that are increasingly collaborating to address global challenges like climate change. In France, Data Terra , the national Research e-Infrastructure (e-IR) supports this effort by managing data for five key Earth system components: Ocean, Atmosphere, Solid Earth, Land Surface, and Biodiversity. As part of Earth observation work, numerous themes and studies of the components of the Earth system produce both data derived from sensors installed on satellite or aerial platforms and data from in-situ measurements. It is particularly true with the Land Surface Data and services Hub (Theia) where data produced and used by the scientist enables to characterise the earth surface conditions and analyse their spatio-temporal dynamics over a long time to better understand and quantify the impacts and the resilience of territories faced to an increase of extreme events such as flooding or heat waves. To ensure efficient data management in repositories, the FAIR principles have been established. They are based on four key concepts: Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability. Among these principles, Interoperability remains a crucial yet challenging aspect, essential for enabling seamless data integration, interpretation, and use by both humans and machines. Achieving FAIR interoperability requires the use of controlled vocabularies and structured representation models that align with these principles. Data produced and used by the Theia hub is made available in data repositories and referenced in catalogues. To improve the Interoperability of this data, controlled vocabularies have been produced by experts. Several observatories from the French Critical Zone Research Infrastructure (OZCAR-RI) that produce the in-situ data documenting the continental surfaces use their own vocabulary, which means that the same observed property may have different variable names (e.g. ‘soil moisture’, ‘soil water content’, etc) which is an obstacle to cross-referencing data from these different sources. In order to harmonize this heterogeneous data managed by different communities and make it FAIR into a common system, the Theia/OZCAR thesaurus , a controlled vocabulary for variable names and objects of interest was created. It implements the SKOS and I-ADOPT framework ontologies (Coussot et al. 2024), enabling precise and FAIR-compliant description of variable names. Like an in-situ observation, one or more composite pixels within a satellite image can be considered as a proxy of a measured phenomenon with one or more variables (soil moisture, landcover, biomass, tree height, etc). Although the community experts in this spatial research area understand the specification of a variable, the definition is not the same for all scientists and it is really useful to cross-reference all the definitions in order to sort, map and merge all this without loss of information. Finally, to highlight them with the production of a dictionary that can be easily shared on the web with a common vocabulary. The Theia spatial vocabulary provides a first thesaurus for the main variables calculated as proxy from remote sensing data (satellite or aerial). Alongside distributed infrastructure services, Data Terra RI provides discovery, access, and dissemination tools to enable researchers to effectively conduct their scientific investigations. Among these resources, EarthPortal, a FAIR-compliant semantic artefact catalogue, promotes the use of SKOS controlled vocabularies and OWL ontologies gathered in thematic categories and groups to enhance semantic interoperability across Earth sciences disciplines (Pierkot et al. 2023). Beyond providing access to semantic artefacts, EarthPortal offers advanced tools to support third-party applications: the annotator , which suggests relevant terms based on textual or keyword input; the recommender , which identifies pertinent semantic artefacts corresponding to the provided input, and the mappings tool , which generates, stores, and visualizes relationships between different semantic artefacts. Through its REST API, EarthPortal facilitates seamless integration with external applications, enabling users to access semantic artefacts and leverage these tools directly within their workflows. A concrete application example with the semantic artefacts provided by the Theia Hub will serve to highlight EarthPortal's functionalities with its user interface and API. To make the both vocabularies developed by the land surfaces data and services hub Theia available and reusable in third-party applications such as the data catalogue, they have been integrated into the EarthPortal. However, with both Theia/Ozcar and Theia/Spatial thesaurus there might be some redundancies in their entry metadata. To facilitate their management, a third entry regroups both thesauri to centralize the metadata and visualize both at once. It will not however replace them, they will instead appear as “views”, a feature that allows to make EarthPortal entries appear as part of another entry. The demonstration will proceed by illustrating how the tool enhances the interoperability of data by integrating EarthPortal with EaSy Data, the French data repository for Earth and Environmental sciences. This connection enriches metadata with semantic annotations, improving discoverability and user experience. Additionally, we will explore recent advancements, such as the federation of EarthPortal with other OntoPortal Alliance platforms to facilitate discovery of semantic artefacts across domains and the future development of a generic connector for the GeoNetwork catalogue, which will allow EarthPortal's semantic artefacts and tools to be used directly, enhancing metadata editing, search and data processes.
Source: ARPHA Conference Abstracts
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4410826479