Science on Schema | EarthCube

EarthCube-funded GeoCODES Contributes to ESIP Science on Schema

As the volume and variety of online information continues to expand, ways to describe and explore data in a broad context has become increasingly important. To address this issue, GeoCODES has been implementing and contributing to the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Science on Schema cluster as well as overall structured data related to web approaches.

Born out of the EarthCube Project 418 funding, Science on Schema represents the ESIP community's commitment to the broader earth science data community. Specifically, Schema.org is an overall community vocabulary to provide broad discovery and access, and Science on Schema is a collection of guidance and recommendations on the implementation of a Schema.org vocabulary for scientific datasets.

This guidance addresses a range of properties on a dataset from funding, variables, authors and more. Combined, these properties help address FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles and directly facilitate the indexing and discovery of resources.

“The publishing approach for this structured data on the web is based on well-known and broadly implemented web standards from the W3C and other groups,” explained Doug Fils of the EarthCube Council of Data Facilities. “As such, this approach is easy to implement and maintain by groups.”

This self-hosted structured data allows efforts like Google's Data Set Search and GeoCODES to crawl and index these resources into a knowledge graph. This graph can then be searched to support discovery and provide connections that can be used to discover relationships between resources. Of particular interest to the GeoCODES team is exploring connections between data and tools and leveraging graph approaches to present this to the user community.

Additionally, this graph also supports encoding of domain "knowledge" alongside multiple resources and provides a means to place these resources in a greater context in a "five-star data" style approach.

“Leveraging PIDs like DOI, ORCID, IGSN and others, allows data to be linked to publications, people and even more - providing a web of data,” Fils said.

For more information about Science on Schema, please see https://github.com/ESIPFed/science-on-schema.org.

About EarthCube:

EarthCube is a community-driven activity sponsored by the National Science Foundation to transform research in the academic geosciences community. EarthCube aims to create a well-connected environment to share data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner, thus accelerating our ability to better understand and predict the Earth’s systems. EarthCube membership is free and open to anyone in the Geosciences, as well as those building platforms to serve the Earth Sciences. The EarthCube Office is led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on the UC San Diego campus.

Media Contact:

Kimberly Mann Bruch, San Diego Supercomputer Center Communications, kbruch@sdsc.edu

Membership Contact:

Lynne Schreiber, San Diego Supercomputer Center EarthCube Office, lschreiber@sdsc.edu