About The Comittee

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

The goals of ESIP’s standing committee for Semantic Technologies are:

To encourage and promote research and development of semantic technologies in support of Earth science data management, data discovery, data dissemination and data analysis. To collaborate with ESIP members, working groups, clusters and committees to identify semantic methods and tools that support the adoption of semantic technologies within ESIP and across its member organizations.

2015-2020 Strategic Plan Goals

  • The committee's 2017 strategic plan is available here: [1]

Resources for ESIP's overall Strategic Plan:


Current Projects and Collaborations

Semantic Projects in which Committee members are involved in can be found in this section of the Strategic Vision document.

Current Collaboration Areas

  1. We are evaluating which ontology portal features (mappings, alignment, visualization, registering, etc.) are of need to the broad Earth science community. As of the ESIP Summer Meeting 2017, a comprehensive Ontology Portal Evaluation has been undertaken to understand what the community needs and what resources are necessary to support those needs.
  2. We are considering how to establish an Ontology Repository Evaluation Roadmap.
  3. We are evaluating what it means to be a "good" ontology and what governance looks like for community developed and maintained semantic resources (ontologies and taxonomies)
  4. In conjunction with ESIP's Products and Services we are helping to evaluate software readiness levels and software reuse.
  5. We are working with ESIP's Cloud Computing Cluster to explore efficient and extensible means of hosting ESIP-wide semantic resources


Collaboration Area Plan

Liaisons to external groups

  • Ruth Duerr - EarthCube Semantics Working Group
  • Soren Scott - RDA Provenance Working Group
  • Stephen Richard - RDA Vocab Services, Terminology IG, and DataType Registry Working Groups
  • Stace Beaulieu - USGS CDI Semantic Web Working Group
  • Adam Shepherd - The Ontolog Community
  • Lewis McGibbney - Spatial Data on the Web (SDW)
  • Bhaskar Ramachandran - The International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA), http://www.iaoa.org/
  • Pascal Hitzler - Ontology Design & Patterns Association
  • John Graybeal - Lead of MMI ORR, BioPortal projects