EarthCube is focused on community-driven development of an integrated, and interoperable knowledge management system for data in the geo- and environmental sciences. By utilizing a cooperative, as opposed to competitive, process like that which created the Internet and Open Source software, EarthCube will attack the recalcitrant and persistent problems that so far have prevented adequate access to and the analysis, visualization, and interoperability of the vast storehouses of disparate geoscience data and data types residing in distributed and diverse data systems. This award funds a series of broad community interactions to gather adequate information and requirements to create a roadmap for a critical cyberinfrastructure capability (semantics and ontologies) in the development of EarthCube. In the context of cyberinfrastructure, semantics and ontologies are what allows heterogeneous and distributed data systems to become interoperable. They enable scientists to register, discover, access, and integrate data irrespective of its structural heterogeneity. This work convenes public, online/virtual meetings and seeks broad community input in the development of a process to have the geoscience and cyberinfrastructure communities converge on a way forward in the realm of semantics and ontologies for data, with the end product being a capability implementation roadmap. Also involved in the process is the identification of appropriate community agreed upon use cases. Broader impacts of the work include development of approaches, protocols, and standards that may be applicable across the sciences and the fostering of close interaction between communities that do not commonly interact, to a great extent, with one another moving them toward a common goal of the creation of a new paradigm in data and knowledge management in the geosciences.
An integrative view of the earth, based on multi-disciplinary data, has become one of the most compelling reasons for research and education in the geosciences. It is necessary to create a modern infrastructure that can support the transformation of data to information leading to new knowledge. Such an infrastructure for the geosciences constitutes the vision of EarthCube which foresees web based "smart searches" that deliver data of interest to the user, as well as visualization and computational capabilities that promote a better understanding of the science associated with earth processes. Such capabilities lie at the foundation of EarthCube whose ultimate goal is to facilitate the use of complex, multidisciplinary data in seeking solutions to geoscience based societal challenges, and a deeper understanding of the earth as a system. The primary objective of the project was to establish both short and long term goals for the use and application of semantics and ontologies in enabling the vision of EarthCube, and was achieved through both virtual and face to face workshops through participation of geoscience and semantics/ontology experts. The results of workshops are available at http://earthcube.ning.com/group/semantics-and-ontologies. The participants emphasized the role of semantics and ontologies in both research and teaching through the recognized need of the geoscience community to share, access, discover, integrate and model data. To meet this goal, community members supported the need to develop collaborative opportunities between geoscientists and semantics/ontology experts. For example, enabling sharing of data through innovative use of metadata as well as semantic tags for data would enable many thousands of geoscientists to act as data nodes. Similarly community based development of semantically enabled tools and services (APPS as used by https://explore.data.gov/catalog/apps/) could be automatically linked to users choice of datasets, and thus facilitate reuse of tools and models. As geoscientists require open access to data and services, integration of data will require new semantically enabled software engines that remove structural, syntactic and semantic heterogeneities, and enable the application of appropriate computational tools through recommender services. The semantics/ontology community group strongly emphasized that adoption of semantic technologies be encouraged to meet all the goals envisioned by EarthCube.
