File:Schentz et al SemanticDataIntegrationforLTER.pdf

In the presentation the application of semantics for LTER-Europe, a community of researchers dealing with long term ecosystem research, will be described. The needs from this community can be seen as representative for the environmental domain within research and public administration. Within the ALTER-Net project a test for semantic data integration has been carried out, where dislocated, very heterogeneous data were mapped to a common ontology, thus allowing a seamless and homogenous data integration. This test showed, that it is feasible, but a lot of issues have to be overcome. One lesson, learned out of this test was, that one comprehensive, complete conceptual model for this big domain cannot be established in a reasonable timeframe. The work has to be split up into several steps, must make use of work already done and a simple start is needed. We developed a thesaurus as a simple start on semantics and interlinked it with other existing vocabularies, which are important for the community (GEMET, EUROVOC, AGROVOC). EnvThes aims to cover the concepts for environmental monitoring and experimentation. So far this thesaurus is used for controlled keywords within the metadata system DEIMS and in the future the concepts should be mapped to an ontology and data should be annotated with the concepts. Building an ontology, derived from ISO19156 (observation and measurement) and annotate the underlying data would be the next steps.