ESIP 2020 Summer Meeting Ontology Tutorial

ESIP Summer Meeting Pre-Conference Event

Introduction to ontologies: enabling collaboration, enhancing interoperability

Co-organized by the ESIP Semantics Technology Committee and Agriculture and Climate Cluster

Overview. Deriving transdisciplinary solutions that are responsive to complex socio-environmental challenges require, as stated in ESIP’s mission statement, linking “observation, research, application, education and use of Earth science”. One of the motivations behind the FAIR Principles (for scientific data management and stewardship) is enhancing machine-augmented capabilities to help researchers and practitioners find relevant data and information across “traditional” silos. The aim of this tutorial is to provide participants with an overview of the role ontologies play in enhancing collaboration across these silos.

Outcomes. The tutorial is meant to:

• help participants understand the value of developing robust descriptions of processes, and harmonizing variable names in code, models, data products, and publications; and
• learn how concept maps can be used to help model knowledge.

Time and date. 2020-07-13 (Monday) | 1200 hrs US eastern daylight time (GMT-4) | 3.5 hours (inclusive of a brief break)

Instructors. The tutorial will be jointly delivered by Drs. Anne Thessen (Oregon State University) and Pier Buttigieg (Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration / GEOMAR).

For ESIP 2020 summer meeting participants. This tutorial provides preparatory background for the following two sessions:

• 2020-07-14. Community concept mapping for data-to-decisions – Use cases in climate adaptation, disaster planning, and disaster response. This session is an integral part of the ESIP Agriculture and Climate Cluster's community concept mapping experiment (March 2020 through July 2020)
• 2020-07-22. Visioning an operational-grade, digital knowledge commons for Earth and Environmental Science.

Presentation Slides.

• Anne Thessen's presentation "Developing Semantic Technology for Earth Science Applications"
• Pier Buttigieg's presentation "Primer: the not-too-scary world of adding Earth science knowledge to the semantic layer"

Recorded Zoom Session. The playback can be accessed here.