BITS - BluePrints for the Integration of Terminology Services in Earth System Sciences

• Applicants: Dr. Markus Stocker; Hannes Thiemann; Dr. Claus Weiland
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Palaeontology ; Atmospheric Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508107981

This project aims to address the major remaining obstacle to the implementation of FAIR principles in Earth System Sciences (ESS). This lies in the inadequate implementation of the encoding of semantics or, in other words, the data interoperability of research data. Within this project, a Terminology Service (TS) will be established for subfields of climate science and geoscientific collections (involving curated objects from mineralogy, petrology and palaeontology) and tested at the two different repositories of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) and Senckenberg - Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research (SGN). Comparable TSs are already in development at the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology for the NFDI consortia NFDI4Chem and NFDI4ING. The experience with the development of these TSs for the two different research fields has shown that a special TS for the ESS is needed. Therefore, the planned project has the following tasks: * Adaptation of the existing TIB Terminology Service to the requirements of the ESS, especially by considering the strong interdisciplinarity of the ESS. * Compilation and examination of the existing specialised vocabularies and ontologies and recommendations of ontologies which should be preferably used in the different sub-disciplines. * Adaptation of the TS to the conditions of the two repositories of DKRZ and SGN and provision of a look-up service for selecting appropriate terms from a controlled vocabulary for data creators and curators. The entire ESS community will profit from this project due to: * The strong involvement of the ESS community in the development process and the provision of appropriate training materials and information in order to strengthen the trust of the different communities and thus promote the use of the TS. * The creation of blueprints for the establishment and use of the TS will enable additional repositories to benefit from the experience of the project partners. The project fits smoothly to the requirements of the LIS programme, as it establishes a specialised information service that both serves research and academia and which will improve the handling of ESS research data.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Ivonne Anders; Dr. Anette Ganske; Dr. Andrea Lammert; Anke Penzlin; Heinrich Widmann; Thomas Winter