IN23D-1753
Progress connecting multi-disciplinary geoscience communities through the VIVO semantic web application

Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
M. Benjamin Gross1, Matthew S. Mayernik2, Linda R Rowan1, Huda Khan3, Frances M Boler1, Keith e Maull2, Don Stott2, Steve Williams4, Jon Corson-Rikert3, Erica Mehan Johns3, Michael D Daniels4 and Dean B. Krafft3, (1)UNAVCO, Inc. Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States, (4)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Earth Observing Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States
Abstract:
UNAVCO, UCAR, and Cornell University are working together to leverage semantic web technologies to enable discovery of people, datasets, publications and other research products, as well as the connections between them. The EarthCollab project, an EarthCube Building Block, is enhancing an existing open-source semantic web application, VIVO, to address connectivity gaps across distributed networks of researchers and resources related to the following two geoscience-based communities: (1) the Bering Sea Project, an interdisciplinary field program whose data archive is hosted by NCAR’s Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL), and (2) UNAVCO, a geodetic facility and consortium that supports diverse research projects informed by geodesy.

People, publications, datasets and grant information have been mapped to an extended version of the VIVO-ISF ontology and ingested into VIVO’s database. Data is ingested using a custom set of scripts that include the ability to perform basic automated and curated disambiguation. VIVO can display a page for every object ingested, including connections to other objects in the VIVO database. A dataset page, for example, includes the dataset type, time interval, DOI, related publications, and authors. The dataset type field provides a connection to all other datasets of the same type. The author’s page will show, among other information, related datasets and co-authors. Information previously spread across several unconnected databases is now stored in a single location. In addition to VIVO’s default display, the new database can also be queried using SPARQL, a query language for semantic data.

EarthCollab will also extend the VIVO web application. One such extension is the ability to cross-link separate VIVO instances across institutions, allowing local display of externally curated information. For example, Cornell’s VIVO faculty pages will display UNAVCO’s dataset information and UNAVCO’s VIVO will display Cornell faculty member contact and position information. Additional extensions, including enhanced geospatial capabilities, will be developed following task-centered usability testing.

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