The new Earth System SciencesTerminology Service (ESS TS)
Creators: name: Ganske, Anette
name: Stocker, Markus
name: Kraft, Angelina
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: Terminology
Terminology Service
Earth System Sciences
participation
BITS project
NFDI4Earth
Semantic Artefacts
Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration Conference

description: Using terminologies can empower scientists and infrastructure providers to realise a machine-processable expression of the information contained in their research data and other academic outputs. In the academic world, ambiguity of terms and the lack of  appropriate keywords is tedious and annoying both, scientists and machines. In addition, there is a lack of controlled vocabularies for many scientific fields. In some cases, the selection of the most appropriate terminology is also difficult. On the other hand, repositories try to promote the use of terminologies as they offer building blocks for (meta-)data schemata and data annotations, and allow the persistent reference to concepts and terms by assigning identifiers like Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs or handles such as Digital Object identifiers (DOIs). 
The BITS project (BluePrints for the Integration of Terminology Services in Earth System Sciences) is trying to find solutions to these problems. As a first step, BITS builds a Terminology Service (TS) for subfields of climate science and geodiversity collections (Earth's diversity of i.a. rocks, fossils, soils, sediments). For this, the project leverages the existing Terminology Service of the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, which currently features more than 160 ontologies, 1.1 million terms and over 22,000 properties from a range of domains such as architecture, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and physics. The TS will then be integrated into the two different data repositories of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) and the Senckenberg - Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research (SGN). In close collaboration with NFDI4Earth and the wider ESS community and TS4NFDI as the NFDI base service project for Terminology Services, the experience gained in building the TS and integrating it into the repositories at DKRZ and SGN will be used to create blueprints that can later be used to connect other Earth System Science repositories to the TS.
This is why we want to join forces with the ESS community. Tell us:

What are your needs for terminology?
What do you expect from such a Terminology Service?  
What ontologies should be part of this TS?
To use this TS, what tools do you need?
How should this TS work together with other collections and TSs, e.g. for  Biological Data?
Which further semantic artefacts (like semantic mappings) are of interest for such a service? 
Join us in building and transferring into your research community the ESS TS so that it can serve as a valuable resource for researchers, students, professionals and developers, providing them with accurate and consistent terminology to enhance their work, improve communication and advance knowledge in their respective fields. Want to know more? Get in touch at Info.BITS@tib.eu.